[bniswe]

Hello, I use XBMC on Ubuntu Karmic and all my media is located on a Samba server (also Ubuntu Karmic).

Since I have had problems with XBMCs built in smb support (Video stops after a couple of seconds, as reported elsewere) I have mounted my Samba share with cifs in fstab in my home directory (/home/bni/Media).

My problem is that i get stutter/lag when playing videos from my Samba share/over the network. This does not happen when i play a movie from a local disk. Most of my movies are in mkv format from 4GB to 8G in size. It is most noticable when I resume play from pause, or when alot changes on the screen, or the scene completely changes in the movie.

Are there any options for the cifs mount or Samba server to increase "buffering", , increase performace, optimize for streaming etc that are known to be good with XBMC, or other streaming applications for that matter.

I have the latest Alpha 2 och XBMC. Gigabit LAN. I can usually copy files to and from my Samba server in about 25 MB/s.

[bniswe]

Replying to my own post in case someone else has this problem.

Since Alpha 2 built in SMB support in XBMC works flawless again, so Im using that now. But if someone feel the need to mount with cifs kernel mode driver...

Performance when mounting with the linux kernels cifs support suck. This is becouse of the small buffer that is in use in kernel mode (I think). You can increase this buffer a little bit giving you a bit more performance:

sudo rmmod cifs
sudo modprobe cifs CIFSMaxBufSize=130048

Then mount with option rsize=130048

This gave med about 15 MB/s. Nothing like the 25-30 MB/s like in userspace programs like Nautilus or XBMC, but nontheless.

[JumJum]

I don't think it has ever been possible to get as good performance out of mount.cifs as you get with smbclient.