[popcornmix]

I'm not convinced the SMB inefficiency is unavoidable.

I've also got a Popcorn Hour media streamer. Originally the belief was that you should use NFS rather than SMB due to it being more efficient. About 3 years ago, this was the case: (link)

We tested with TS, which gives best bitrate performance due to
the demux is done in hardware, also no dependencies on software
demux by CPU.

SMB: ~19Mbps
NFS: ~33Mbps
HTTP: ~42Mbps (same clip peaks at 47Mbps)
USB HDD: ~42Mbps
USB DVDROM (8x): ~42Mbps
Internal HDD: ~42Mbps

However they did some work optimising their SMB client and: (link)

Actually SMB is now circa 38mb/s.

and I believe to this day, SMB performs better than NFS (still a little lower than HTTP).

[vagabondking]

I completely agree. same for smbclient vs mount_cifs. This makes comparison even more complicated. Which is why I was thinking about doing a packet capture for the duration of a movie for each connection method. Of course use the same movie for each test. Then run it through some scripts or even just wireshark to view statistics about the stream. Regarding the fact that FTP connections don't scrape .nfo or client art, is there a matrix that you (or anyone else) know of that shows the different capabilities of XBMC between protocols?

[vagabondking]

I love my popcorn hour and I remember reading that same wiki article. As stated earlier in this topic, a big part of performance depends on the client as well. I don't know if the pch uses nsf v4. Considering that the hardware is completely different between the atv2 and the pch, I'm not sure how valid those stats are.

[popcornmix]

Regarding the fact that FTP connections don't scrape .nfo or client art, is there a matrix that you (or anyone else) know of that shows the different capabilities of XBMC between protocols?

I've fixed my problem with scraping over ftp. See here

[haffi]

I did some research on this posted my results here.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=96958

[vagabondking]

Nice... Good stuff. That's pretty much what I want to do, but I want to compare different protocols. My thoughts are to use tcpdump to capture a 5 or 10 minute movie. The problem I am having is that I want XBMC to reboot or shutdown or perform some action when the movie is finished so that I can see it in the capture. Strange that it should have to buffer when your stream seems to keep an average around 5megabits. Have you tried webdav or any other protocol?