[MPlayer-users] hd video playback problems over wireless network

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 09:17:05PM +0800, h9wzuy45tm at snkmail.com wrote:
> Conclusions.
> - f/g/h << a/b/c. latency plays a big role.

Irrelevant for deciding what MPlayer should do though.

> - Generally, c>=b>=a; h>=g>=f. increasing buffer size either helps
> significantly or doesn't worsen throughput appreciably.

It does increase latency though and might cause serious performance
issue e.g. when seeking or when playing mp4/mov files.

> - WinXP and Mac OSX both benefit significantly from larger buffer sizes
> - Ubuntu doesn't benefit much.
> - XP and OSX with large buffer size can approach or exceed Ubuntu
> smbfs performance.

I can't help to say you could state this less objectively as
"WinXP/Mac OSX prefetching is crap, as is the in-kernel smbfs
implementation".
You probably should have used cifs instead of smbfs, because I
think the original smbfs is limited to transfer 16kB per request,
and requests have to be serial.

> So, another major OS (Windows) has the same issue.

I'll try to find time to think about it. However I currently don't
see a way that doesn't cause more issues than it fixes.
Note that you can link MPlayer against libsmb so you don't need
to mount things in the first place, and if there is a performance
issue there that is more easily fixable.