2013-09-11, 08:55
TLDR; XBMC pauses while buffering even though I know (from experimental file transfers) that the network is more than sufficient to stream the file.
I have an Asus N66U router, which has a 2TB usb hard drive attached. The router uses Tomato firmware (version 1.28 shibby), and shares all content on the hard drive through samba, and is 802.11n. I have a laptop connected to my TV, which is pretty far from the router (probably about 50ft) which connects wirelessly.
I've been having issues where XBMC pauses and begins buffering a lot of the time - ordinarily I would just assume that the network wasn't up to snuff, or the file was too big, or whatever. But if I find the file on the router (using windows explorer) and copy it to the laptop (from the same location it is when I run XBMC), it takes only 4 minutes to copy a 1.3gb, 45 minute video file (this is a rough average after 5 trials). The file transfer goes about 3.5MB/s.
One of my theories was that perhaps the hard drive was spinning down in between XBMC's calls, forcing it to wait for it to spin back up. I tried a setting in the Tomato firmware to keep the hard drive from spinning down when idle, but I still had the same buffering issues.
Does anyone know why this may be happening? All I can figure is that XBMC is waiting until the last millisecond when it runs out the buffer before it asks for more content, and then perhaps there is an elaborate handshake or some other overhead that causes the pause. If there is perhaps a setting that makes XBMC much more conservative, that would be great. I've messed with the buffer size in advancedsettings.xml, but it didn't seem to help at all.
Thanks for any help.
I have an Asus N66U router, which has a 2TB usb hard drive attached. The router uses Tomato firmware (version 1.28 shibby), and shares all content on the hard drive through samba, and is 802.11n. I have a laptop connected to my TV, which is pretty far from the router (probably about 50ft) which connects wirelessly.
I've been having issues where XBMC pauses and begins buffering a lot of the time - ordinarily I would just assume that the network wasn't up to snuff, or the file was too big, or whatever. But if I find the file on the router (using windows explorer) and copy it to the laptop (from the same location it is when I run XBMC), it takes only 4 minutes to copy a 1.3gb, 45 minute video file (this is a rough average after 5 trials). The file transfer goes about 3.5MB/s.
One of my theories was that perhaps the hard drive was spinning down in between XBMC's calls, forcing it to wait for it to spin back up. I tried a setting in the Tomato firmware to keep the hard drive from spinning down when idle, but I still had the same buffering issues.
Does anyone know why this may be happening? All I can figure is that XBMC is waiting until the last millisecond when it runs out the buffer before it asks for more content, and then perhaps there is an elaborate handshake or some other overhead that causes the pause. If there is perhaps a setting that makes XBMC much more conservative, that would be great. I've messed with the buffer size in advancedsettings.xml, but it didn't seem to help at all.
Thanks for any help.
