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sieb · Apr 30, 2006, 11:54 PM

Ok, so I was hoping this would have been fixed by now but apparently CIFS/SMB is still broken in OSX... I have a network server running windows where I house my movie collection shared on my network. With my windows laptop, I was able to watch movies off it across my lan wirelessly (.11g) without any problems. But on a PB, when I try to watch movies, no matter what player I use (mplayer, wmp, vlc, qt) they all lag every few seconds. It's not the wireless connection since I am only in the next room over and have good signal, and I can stream movies/trailers across the internet wirelessly without any problem.. It's almost like it fills the buffer and plays till its out, then downloads more, instead of streaming. Telling the players to increase the buffer/cache doesn't help. Anyone have a fix?

Tomchu · May 1, 2006, 01:29 AM

Nope, there's no fix as far as I know. It's just a matter of crappy file streaming performance in OS X like you say. I had an identical problem, but in reverse. My Mac Mini used to be a movie server for my network (300 GB external drive over Firewire), and streaming movies off it over the WLAN totally sucked. It didn't matter whether I used SMB or AFP ... it would always be jerky. I too thought it felt a lot like the buffer running out.

Mind you, my WLAN performs in the 3 - 4 MB (megabyte) / sec range, so it's not an issue of WLAN performance.

My movie collection is now on a Linux server with the same 300 GB drive, and streaming movies off it over SMB to my iBook works perfectly.

sieb · May 2, 2006, 08:15 AM

Hmm.. If you can stream fine to your iBook via SMB, I would like to know why the same doesn't work for me. I'm surprised that more people haven't said anything if this is a long running OS problem. Then again, OSX still has yet to remember LEAP networks, so why should I be surprised...

Tomchu · May 2, 2006, 11:52 AM

What kind of wireless router do you have? There could be a few settings that I might be able to tweak for you.

sieb · May 2, 2006, 12:13 PM

As usual, I think I solved my problem on my own. Did some digging through Apples forum and came up with:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1460
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65535
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65535
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.newreno=0

This seems to do the trick.

Laurence · May 2, 2006, 07:58 PM

will those settings work for wired connections as well... I have the same issue with AFP streaming over ethernet and I have a gigabit router and CAT6 cabling for everything. My new Mac Mini is what I stream to (connected to the TV) and the G4 server is where the movies are stored. I couldn't believe the networking infastructure was so bad. I installed Windows on the Mini (Bootcamp) and it works great. I downloaded the new Universal MPlayer and turned up the cache (for slow media) setting to max and now it works fine. QT, VLC, RealPlayer, etc all stutter every 10 seconds or so.

Apple really needs to address this properly before they come out with any sort of set-top media device. (Other than the Mini I guess!)

sieb · May 2, 2006, 11:55 PM

The settings I changed we're apparently the same ones that the Broadband/FiOS patch for OSX changes, but I can't confirm it. I can confirm that the settings work, everything streams to my laptop without stutters from all players.

Tomchu · May 3, 2006, 12:18 AM

Since I haven't had problems with streaming since moving my file server over to Linux, I can't say one way or another if those settings help, but I did get some ideas from them, and I've managed to squeeze an extra ~350 KB/s over my wire transfers to my server.

Before I topped out at about 11,050 KB/s when downloading from it, and now I manage 11,400 KB/s.

sieb · 06:31 AM

Sweet! I didn't bother to measure the speed before/after I made my changes, video streams when before it didn't, thats all I need.

I did notice that network shares mount alot faster in addition to regular file transfers too. Odd thing is that my previous file server was BSD and had the same problems with streaming..

NOTE* According to some places where I have read, You might have to add these lines to the end of the /etc/rc file right before the "exit 0" statement in order for them to be set after a reboot. I tried the settings after a reboot without doing this and everything still streamed fine eventhough the settings had defaulted to their original values when I plugged them back in at the terminal (i.e. it showed the value change: 3 => 0). *shrugs*

Tomchu · May 3, 2006, 12:13 PM

Since they're sysctl variables, you can just stick them in /etc/sysctl.conf (create it if it's not there), and use the format sysctlvar=value. One variable per line.

:-)

sieb · May 3, 2006, 11:42 PM

cool beans! Thanks

Laurence · May 16, 2006, 12:39 AM

It looks like it may not have been a network issue after all... The latest update to FrontRow and/or Quicktime seem to have resolved all my stuttering playback issues. It may very well be that the update did modify some network settings, however it doesn't really matter. FrontRow works perfectly for me now.