[l008com]

I have a ton of movie files of all different kinds (not porn :-P) and I keep them on my HUGE hard drive in my server. The problem is that when I go to play them over the LAN, via a mounted AFP volume (100 Ethernet & 10/100 Switch) the video skips, and like jumps. This is using the QuickTime player. Can you use QTTS so stream any type of file QuickTime can read, or will it only do certain types? Many of the files are Divx and other MPG4 variants that need funny 3rd party codecs to play. Is there a way to simply make the QT player buffer the movie its playing? There is way more than enough bandwidth in 100 Ethernet, it just isn't aways available the ms you need it like it is on a local drive. I guess that last solution would be any other players, like VLC, that can play over a LAN smoothly?

[brainchild2b]

I'm guessing your switch somewhere is just 10base instead of 100. True 100 when setup right should play just fine. don't know about AFP though ..

[MrNo]

I play movies from a samba share via a 100 base T, with the VLC player and have no problems

[int69h]

Using Samba over 10BT handles the load just fine on my LAN. The VFS should already be performing buffering for you. Do you experience jumps when playing the movies off of a local drive? If so, you might need to run Divx Doctor on them.

[Thinine]

I would try VLC before actually changing the files. And I've been able to play video over a 10 Base network before.

[rytc]

Originally posted by Thinine:
I would try VLC before actually changing the files. And I've been able to play video over a 10 Base network before.

Interestingly despite how played up VLC is 4 movies I just downloaded don't play in it. They only play in Quicktime properly, in VLC the sounded is all muffed. I have to say divx movies are an example of one of the biggest messes ever conceived of IMHO.

[l008com]

No the switch really is at 100, and I know this becuase it copies file lightening fast. And I know all about divx, and its not a Divx thing. I don't know if I tried anything in VLC over my network, but the QT player skips playing any big files over my network. I'll have to try VLC later and see how it works.

[Millennium]

The problem isn't so much speed as latency.

Think of it this way: let's set up two ways to get data from New York to Los Angeles. One way is a 56K modem connection. The other one is sending a truckload of DVD's via [INSERT FAVORITE OVERNIGHT SHIPPING COMPANY HERE].

A 56K modem connection can't carry a lot of data at once. It's not very good in terms of speed. However, transferring a single byte will only take half a second at most; just put it through the wire and you're done. Such a connection is low-speed (bad), but it's also low-latency (good).

Meanwhile, using the truckload of DVD's, you can get many terabytes of data sent in one day, much faster than even the fastest networks in common use today. However, you have to wait all day for even a single byte to get through. So this "connection" is very high-speed (good), but it's also very high-latency (bad).

What does this mean? Well, there are times when latency is more important than speed, particularly if you are transferring relatively small amounts of data over many different connections. You would not, for example, want to deathmatch someone in Quake by sending floppies with network data through the mail.

Your video-file situation is another example. Networks are fast, but compared to hard drives they're still very high-latency. QuickTime loads in data as it's needed by default, so it's making many small requests to the server rather than one big request to get the whole thing at once. This saves a lot of memory, but it kills video performance in your situation.

You can tell QuickTime to load the video all in one go; this will fix your problem. However, there are three disadvantages to this method. One, it requires QuickTime Pro, because you have to make a slight change to each file. Two, files using this method will take MUCH longer to open, particularly if they are large. Three, you're going to need lots of RAM. As in, about twice as much RAM as your largest video file, with a minimum of 512 megs just to be on the safe side (I assume you have some movie rips in your collection).

If you decide to do this, here's the method:

1. Open the movie.
2. Pick "Get Movie Properties" from the Movie menu, or use Command-J. Note that this is different from "Show Movie Info", which uses Command-I.
3. The window which appears has two pulldown menus at the top. Set the left one to "Sound Track" and the right one to "Preload".
4. Check "Preload" and "Cache Hint".
5. Repeat the above step with the left menu set to "Video Track".
6. Save the file.

When you next open the file, it will be preloaded. Unforutnately, you will have to do this on a file-by-file basis. In the end, it may be cheaper to just get a big FireWire hard drive and use that; FireWire, being intended for local peripherals, is lower-latency than most network products.

[l008com]

I have several 1.4 GB files...
I have 1.1 GB of ram but still.
Isn't there a way QuickTime can just buffer the data, keeping sao 5, 10, even 50 MB in the buffer, so latency wouldn't be an issue but at the same time you wouldn't have to wait 4 minutes to open a movie AND you wouldn't need 4 GB of RAM to watch? What about using QTTS?

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by Thinine:
I would try VLC before actually changing the files. And I've been able to play video over a 10 Base network before.

Yeah, I use VLC to stream divxs from my roommates PC using DAVE (SMB) and it works perfectly. We have a 100bt network but Net Monitor only reports that I'm getting it in about 300k/s chunks so a 10bt link in the network should not slow it down that much.