[Zim]

I have a 1.83 Duo Mini connected to my TV

I have it connected upstairs to a G4/1.42 DP via gigabit ethernet

The problem I see is that while I can copy an hour stored video from upstairs to downstairs in roughly 2 minutes, and play without skip from the Mini's local drive, if I try to play directly from the drives in my G4 (Mini is accessing these as network shares), I get skips.

I am using VLC.

Currently my setup is

Cable modem -> Gigabit swtich -> from there I connect to both G4 and Mini

The cable modem to Gigabit switch is a 100 Mbps connection

Possibility A:
I have a spare FE NIC, so conceivably I could reconfigure as to be
Cable Modem -> FE Nic on G4 -> out the built-in GE port to the Mini, but then I'd have to set up the G4 to route from its GE port to the FE port.. correct?

Possibility B:
Do I need to tune my Ethernet params for this setup. I have tried min size and max size pkts with little improvement... the skips are smaller, but not less frequent with min size pkts.

Possibility C:
Is there some kind of caching I can set up so that it will absorb any network hiccups?

Thanks for any ideas,
Mike

[Zim]

So far it appears network setting are not the answer.

On the feature "to-do" list for VLC is a read-ahead buffer/cache.. but its not there yet.
This way the player will always have enough stored locally in case the server box has another disk access going on.

Mplayer has one (in the GUI and also in the cmd-line binary (put cache <value> into $HOME/.mplayer/config)

So for the meantime I may go with mplayer (tho I prefer VLC).

Mike

[Tuoder]

The G4 Minis had slow hard drives. Will the files play locally on the Mini?

[Zim]

Originally Posted by Tuoder 

The G4 Minis had slow hard drives. Will the files play locally on the Mini?

They will play locally more than fine.. just didn't want to have to copy the files down each time... the gigabit has tons more bandwidth than needed, just need a smidge of disk caching... which VLC does not have (yet), and mplayer does.. but cannot get mplayer to output digital audio over optical

Mike