Mailing List Archive

Smooth video playback of mounted files
To play media files shared over a wifi network on N900 following is what I
tried:

Setup: A common file server to share media files over home wifi network.

Options: upnp, sshfs/nfs mounted share, streaming server

Observations:

1. All options work fine for audio files.

2. With sshfs/nfs, video files up to limited resolution (VCD quality) work
fine.

3. Between vlc and mplayer, vlc works much smoother. (Ovi not considered.
It doesn't work well.) I think vlc utilizes the DSP hardware of N900
better while mplayer as yet doesn't.

4. Between sshfs and nfs mount, nfs works slightly better.

5. For higher resolution videos (DVD quality) none of the options works.



Following observations are for a DVD quality video:

- mplayer doesn't work well (or may be is very hard to tune) even if the
file was copied to local memory card.

- vlc works very well if the file was copied locally. However over nfs
mount it is not smooth.

- Network bandwidth is not a problem. The wifi interface shows transfer
speeds of 10mbps and the bitrate of the video is around 2mbps.

- Between other 2 machines on the same network, the video over NFS plays
fine without any caching options of vlc. (Shows network is not
bottleneck.)

- Still, tried file-caching option of vlc, though no effect.

- Since N900 plays same video fine if copied on memory card and that for
other machines on same network nfs mounted videos play fine, it seems
it is either N900's cpu or nfs client is the bottleneck.

- Tried streaming to N900 from other machine (instead of mounting files)
using vlc. The quality is not satisfactory.


So, in summary, so far, NFS mounted filesystem with vlc as player has
given best results, though it needs some fine tuning to make higher
resolution videos work smoothly.

Any inputs?

Mayuresh.
_______________________________________________
maemo-users mailing list
maemo-users@maemo.org
https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users