View unanswered posts    View active topics

All times are UTC - 6 hours





Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 12 posts ] 
Print view Previous topic   Next topic  
Author Message
Search for:
PostPosted: Fri Jan 23, 2009 3:12 pm 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Posts: 6
Since my Acer Aspire Idea with Windows Xp Media center is dead, well the bleu on/off light still works, but nothing else (And i'am discussing with the support center at Acer) i finally have made the step to install Myth Tv. And since i have good experience with Knopp installations i have decided to install Knoppmyth.

All works fine, but when i play an avi or mpeg over LAN (FreeBSD server) through Samba client Or NFS client (NFS works slightly better than Samba) my Avi's are playing jittery.

When i copy the Avi to the local harddisk, all works fine. No jitter what so-over. Strange thing is that my media center had no problem with playing avi over LAN (Well if i was moving lots of MB through lan it could by jittery sometimes). How did Bill do this? Media Center dual core 1.6 Ghz, now i use a 3,2 Ghz (Single core). Fast enough!!

So Bottom line, is there a way to buffer 5 seconds before playing? What is abvious is that the movie starts very fast, so i expect that there is no buffering at all.


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Fri Jan 23, 2009 4:32 pm 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
wayward wrote:
All works fine, but when i play an avi or mpeg over LAN (FreeBSD server) through Samba client Or NFS client (NFS works slightly better than Samba) my Avi's are playing jittery.

When i copy the Avi to the local harddisk, all works fine. No jitter what so-over.

So Bottom line, is there a way to buffer 5 seconds before playing? What is abvious is that the movie starts very fast, so i expect that there is no buffering at all.


Welcome to the forums first off. Your processor is plenty powerful to playback SDTV avi/mpeg files. As an extreme example, I setup KM R5.5 on a friend's 500 MHz PIII (256 or 384 megs of RAM) and he uses it to watch avi (xvid I think) videos and play back over his 10/100 LAN is flawless (mapped a Win64 share via cifs which is described in this HOWTO in case you're new to LINUX).

I didn't setup any special buffer options for mplayer, but I did recompile mplayer because the one that come with KM had some problems.

If you're sure that your LAN is okay, you might want to try recompiling mplayer to see if that helps your jitter problem. If you don't want to try that, and to answer your original question about a buffer option, see the following URLs:

Pimp my mplayer
Mplayer man page

To enable stream buffering in mplayer:

Code:
$ nano ~/.mplayer/config
<add the following to the default config>
cache=8192
cache-min=4


...the more I think about it, I'm not sure that will help you since you're technically not streaming your videos. If you're using NFS or Samba I'm assuming you mounted the share to a physical directory such as /myth/video/share?

So two questions:

1) How did you mount the shares from your BSD box to your KM box?
2) What ethernet driver are you using and is the NIC configured correctly? Post output of your dmesg as it pertains to your ethernet card like this:

Code:
$ cat /var/log/dmesg | grep eth


Also post the output of ifconfig for that NIC like this:

Code:
$ ifconfig eth0

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Fri Jan 23, 2009 5:23 pm 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Posts: 6
Quote:
Welcome to the forums first off. Your processor is plenty powerful to playback SDTV avi/mpeg files. As an extreme example, I setup KM R5.5 on a friend's 500 MHz PIII (256 or 384 megs of RAM) and he uses it to watch avi (xvid I think) videos and play back over his 10/100 LAN is flawless (mapped a Win64 share via cifs which is described in this HOWTO in case you're new to LINUX).


Thankyou, and don't you just hate it when they only post when they got problems! ;-)
Good to hear i have enough CPU and memory (Got 2 GB), old pc of my girlfriend. She only works on her laptop, so i changed her desktop to something usefull! I'am not totally new, i have installed FreeBSD with full HDD encryption, it's a 264 step formula! So i know quite a lot, but i have to change the idea's of port installations with knoppmyth. Installation was really easy and smooth!

Quote:
I didn't setup any special buffer options for mplayer, but I did recompile mplayer because the one that come with KM had some problems.[/qoute]

I will try to re compile, see what it does.

Quote:
If you're sure that your LAN is okay, you might want to try recompiling mplayer to see if that helps your jitter problem. If you don't want to try that, and to answer your original question about a buffer option, see the following URLs:

Pimp my mplayer
Mplayer man page


Well, when i play a Avi or Mpeg on my pc upstair and/or on my laptop downstears, it plays good (on my xp systems)!

Quote:
To enable stream buffering in mplayer:

Code:
$ nano ~/.mplayer/config
<add the following to the default config>
cache=8192
cache-min=4


...the more I think about it, I'm not sure that will help you since you're technically not streaming your videos. If you're using NFS or Samba I'm assuming you mounted the share to a physical directory such as /myth/video/share?


Yes have a directory /mnt/video and used:
Code:
 mount –t smbfs //10.30.0.3/audio [Spatie] /mnt/ -ousername=gebruikersnaam,password=wachtwoord.


Quote:
So two questions:

1) How did you mount the shares from your BSD box to your KM box?


Code:
mount –t smbfs //10.30.0.3/audio [Spatie] /mnt/ -ousername=gebruikersnaam,password=wachtwoord.

and

mount 10.30.0.3:/encrypt_a /mnt/nfs


Quote:
2) What ethernet driver are you using and is the NIC configured correctly? Post output of your dmesg as it pertains to your ethernet card like this:

Code:
$ cat /var/log/dmesg | grep eth



eth0: VIA Rhine III at 0xd3002000, 00:11:09:40:d5:e1, IRQ 17.
eth0: MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x786d advertising 05e1 Link 45e1.
forcedeth.c: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.60.
eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1

Quote:
Also post the output of ifconfig for that NIC like this:

Code:
$ ifconfig eth0


eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:09:40:D5:E1
inet addr:10.30.0.20 Bcast:10.30.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::211:9ff:fe40:d5e1/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1181931 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:747759 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1677015738 (1.5 GiB) TX bytes:74132188 (70.6 MiB)
Interrupt:17 Base address:0x4000

Kind a think about this, i did not know these commands, never had to use 'm. I always hated shared IRQ's, i will try to fiddle around in the bios to get this NIC on his own IRQ.

As i'am looking at al this new data, the next thing i see:
Code:
inet6 addr: fe80::211:9ff:fe40:d5e1/64 Scope:Link
, I remember with vista that IPv6 IS a problem on my LAN. I had to disable this on the laptop of my girlfriend to get de Samba Share's working fast on her laptop. Hmmm... Is this on or off, how do i figure this out....


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Jan 24, 2009 8:42 am 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
Looks like you're mounting it correctly and your netdriver seems to be in order... I doubt this is your problem, but just for shits and giggles, try your mount -t command with cifs rather than smbfs. As to your IPv6 question, I dunno :)

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Jan 24, 2009 9:16 am 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Posts: 6
graysky wrote:
Looks like you're mounting it correctly and your netdriver seems to be in order... I doubt this is your problem, but just for shits and giggles, try your mount -t command with cifs rather than smbfs. As to your IPv6 question, I dunno :)


cifs is not working ok, becease my rights where srewed up, with smbfs i have no problem. When i Use nfs same problem appears, and my rights are ok but avi is still jittery.

I disabled ipv6 by the following manual:
http://free.albantech.com/howtos/debian/disableipv6.php

This brought no luck, but i will try all your other suggestions. I noticed something else, when i use ssh to control Knoppmyth, sometimes ssh does not react, so it must be the network card or something. I will also try to disable the integrated NIC and use a seperate in a PCI slot. I will keep you posted!


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Jan 24, 2009 1:10 pm 
Offline
Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location: Arlington, MA
You might want to do some throughput testing on that interface, since something as simple as a bad cable can cause the two end points to negotiate down to a slower speed. I've had this happen on a couple of occasions, seeing both 100BaseT running at 10BaseT speeds and GigE at 100BaseT speeds. One of the easiest ways to check is with file transfers. (Beware when measuring GigE this way that you may run out of disk bandwidth before network bandwidth...) You should have at least 2-3 times the bandwidth needed in theory or you may suffer stalls and glitches.

For example lets say you have an SDTV recording with 110 minutes of content and it's 5360168964 bytes long. That works out to about 0.8Mbytes per second that would need to be transfered. When you add in packet overhead, acks and the like, that would be pretty close to 1Mbyte/S or very close to saturating a 10baseT link (10Mbit/S). HDTV recordings are ~6x as big (1920*1080)/(720*480), so a 100BaseT connection is about the minimum you can get away with, and it would be running at around 60% of capacity. That doesn't leave you a whole lot of headroom if somebody else in the house is using the net heavily.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 6:58 am 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Posts: 6
tjc wrote:
You might want to do some throughput testing on that interface, since something as simple as a bad cable can cause the two end points to negotiate down to a slower speed. I've had this happen on a couple of occasions, seeing both 100BaseT running at 10BaseT speeds and GigE at 100BaseT speeds. One of the easiest ways to check is with file transfers. (Beware when measuring GigE this way that you may run out of disk bandwidth before network bandwidth...) You should have at least 2-3 times the bandwidth needed in theory or you may suffer stalls and glitches.

For example lets say you have an SDTV recording with 110 minutes of content and it's 5360168964 bytes long. That works out to about 0.8Mbytes per second that would need to be transfered. When you add in packet overhead, acks and the like, that would be pretty close to 1Mbyte/S or very close to saturating a 10baseT link (10Mbit/S). HDTV recordings are ~6x as big (1920*1080)/(720*480), so a 100BaseT connection is about the minimum you can get away with, and it would be running at around 60% of capacity. That doesn't leave you a whole lot of headroom if somebody else in the house is using the net heavily.


Thanks for the advice!

I think thats oke, see the results when i transfer a file from my server to mythtv:

wget http://10.30.0.3/7_Seconds.avi
--12:41:35-- http://10.30.0.3/7_Seconds.avi
=> `7_Seconds.avi'
Connecting to 10.30.0.3:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 730,101,760 (696M) [video/x-msvideo]

100%[====================================>] 730,101,760 5.76M/s ETA 00:00

12:43:39 (5.64 MB/s) - `7_Seconds.avi' saved [730101760/730101760]


An average of 5.64 MB/s


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 7:23 am 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Posts: 6
After this test i player fast & furious again and it played like a charm. Seems that a router or something has an intermittend problem. And i hate that kind of problems! I will keep you posted!

And thanks for all the advice!


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 8:50 am 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
wayward wrote:
wget http://10.30.0.3/7_Seconds.avi
--12:41:35-- http://10.30.0.3/7_Seconds.avi
=> `7_Seconds.avi'
Connecting to 10.30.0.3:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 730,101,760 (696M) [video/x-msvideo]

100%[====================================>] 730,101,760 5.76M/s ETA 00:00

12:43:39 (5.64 MB/s) - `7_Seconds.avi' saved [730101760/730101760]

An average of 5.64 MB/s


Is 5,64 M/s normal for 100baseTX? I have a GigLAN setup and get 30-40 M/s.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 10:13 am 
Offline
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Posts: 6
graysky wrote:
wayward wrote:
wget http://10.30.0.3/7_Seconds.avi
--12:41:35-- http://10.30.0.3/7_Seconds.avi
=> `7_Seconds.avi'
Connecting to 10.30.0.3:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 730,101,760 (696M) [video/x-msvideo]

100%[====================================>] 730,101,760 5.76M/s ETA 00:00

12:43:39 (5.64 MB/s) - `7_Seconds.avi' saved [730101760/730101760]

An average of 5.64 MB/s


Is 5,64 M/s normal for 100baseTX? I have a GigLAN setup and get 30-40 M/s.


I think so, 5*10 = 50 M/s (Dude i think you mis 10 M/s) ;-)

I sure hope i find out what the real problem is, very strange that this has happened at the same time of the crash of my media center.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 11:40 am 
Offline
Joined: Wed Dec 10, 2003 8:31 pm
Posts: 1996
Location: /dev/null
Try copying a large file via scp and report back the output (something around 600 megs or so like the KM iso for example).

Code:
$ scp squeeze@mythtv:/home/squeeze/*.VOB ~
squeeze@mythtv's password:
VTS_01_PGC_01_2.VOB                                          100%  540MB  30.0MB/s   00:18

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 12:32 pm 
Offline
Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location: Arlington, MA
graysky wrote:
[Is 5,64 M/s normal for 100baseTX? I have a GigLAN setup and get 30-40 M/s.

You've probably hit the disk throughput limit I was talking about, that's about where my big file transfers top out too, even with jumbo frames. Not only that but since the PCI bus runs at 33Mhz and can transfer 4 bytes/cycle it's max throughput is 133Mbytes/S so a single GigE link can effectively saturate it. GigE is *fast*. :-D PCI-e is faster, but the slowest link in the chain sets the maximum throughput.

Oh and the larger the transfer size the more realistic your result will be. Small files often gain or lose substantially due to buffer effects.


Top
 Profile  
 

Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 12 posts ] 


All times are UTC - 6 hours




Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 16 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group

Theme Created By ceyhansuyu