@
Memphiz - definitely don't think that at all! I fully get volunteer and open source and how time consuming development work is - I'm grateful for even the slightest attention.
@
Maetrik - well, that's interesting - would be a lot more interesting if you could post a bunch of your server/client details. Would you mind - might help isolate things further (e.g. just hanewin, or something to do with hanewin settings or share naming?)
@
ashlar - ah well that is a saga. Basically, NFS performs better. In actual tests I mean - I'ev always noticed it paticularly much with long lists of files (e.g. directories of pictures). But in the media streaming world it's been a well known trick since the earlier days to get better streaming going on - basically if you loo through any popcorn, hdx, zensonic old forum you will see scores of people using NFS reliably where SMB just doesn't cut it. For some reason, if your network isn't great (wireless, popwerline etc) - NFS will simply work in a lot of scenarios that SMB won't. I originally moved to NFS because of a severe xbmc SMB hanging bug (don't know if they ever did solve that - see 22 pages of painfor many people here for instance:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=66124). But I'd used NFS before with a popcorn etc and found it very very reliable and less messy with user account issues etc. There's also the advantage of the fact I can use NFS and no path substitution (which I have found slow and buggy with non-ascii characters) - on all cients (I have some OE boxes that are not having NFS issues hence not mentioned here). But if you do some straight file copies across a typical network with NFS vs SMB, you'll routinely see higher transfer rates with NFS than SMB, or at least on the (several) networks I run that's the case. E.g. you might get 25-30 mb/s with SMB vs 40+ with NFS on the same network. With those figures it wouldn't matter but the with powerline it might be more like 6mb vs 9mb and that makes all the difference in the world to reliable streaming.
I am definitely not alone in this and if there is a general NFS bug with xbmc windows, I think you'll be surprised how many people it will effect in the end. I suspect quite a few pi users will be using it as NFS stresses the Pi less seemingly, for one thing. There's 5 pages of threads just mentioning one exclusively windows server - hanewin - so that's at least a few!
But again - any attention is a bonus and I am just trying to gather data make it reproducibke so it can be fixed. My next plan is to wireshark and look for nfs errors I think...something for the weekend!