Kodi Community Forum

I would like to apologize in advance if this has already been covered but I can't seem to find the answer anywhere.

I have a big bad linux server at my office (huge up link), on which I have many gigabytes of media. I would like to access my media from home via xbmc on my mac.

Currently I have my media folder web accessible behind htaccess and in order to watch something, I right click on the link, choose save as and play the .part file in VLC.

I have installed xbmc on my mac and have tried everything to access the remote filesystem via the xbmc interface but it takes ages to start or the whole thing just locks up.

I have tried webdav: I setup webdav on my linux apache box and I can mount it via finder as a share on my mac.

I can browse the folders on the share in finder, but it is very slow. WheI try to access something via xbmc it just locks up and stops responding. If I leave it alone for a really long time it sometimes strts playing but I cant control it, change aspect ratio, move around or anything.

I tried setting up a read only samba share, and using fuse an sshfs share and I get the same problem. I also reduced xbmc cahche size to 1 MB.

When I download via http I get 500MB/s which is more than enough to watch in realtime. I don't get why I can't make this work.

I also tried mounting the share via sshfs on my linux box and mounting it on my xbmc/mac via samba and afp and still slow as all hell.

I really don't get why it works via firefox/.part file but in no other way.

Does anyone else have this kind of setup?

How do you guys make it work?

My internet connection is 500Kbps down and 80 up. I don't ususally have anything else running.

If I could get xbmc to work off my office server I would have a really awesome media solution.

Please help

Search for "statfiles"

UPDATE

I am on to something

Using webdav xbmc will play files but only once it has cached the whole thing. This is a peoblem as movie files can be quite large. While the xbmc is cacheing it completly locks up and refuses to respond. When in Fullscreen mode that mean I can't use my computer for the 30 minutes or so while it downloads the file.

I uped my video cache to 16 megs but that didn't help.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? if so how did you overcome it?

I tried proftp on my server and regular ftpd but I couldn't get the xbmc to connect. ftpd logs said it would connect and imediatly request disconnect.

Help?

Hi wilx,

You seem to be a bit confused about your internet connection speed.

You say that when you download via http you get 500MB/s. That is seriously fast - I think the fastest fibre optic broadband is only 50MB/s at the moment.

Then later you say your connection is 500kbps - this seems more likely but this is a bit slow for video streaming.

1 byte (B) = 8 bits (b).
1MB = 2^20 bytes = 1048576 bytes.

500kbps = 500000 / (8 * 1048576) = approximately 0.06 MB/s.

That is an optimistic speed - you will probably not reach this in the real world.

Suppose your movie is 1GB and 100 mins.

1 GB = 2^30 = 1073741824 bytes.
100 mins = 6000 s.

Data rate = 178957 bytes/s = approximately 0.17 MB/s

So in conclusion - your internet connection is not fast enough to stream video down from your server. You will have to buffer the whole file or transfer the file to a local disk before you watch it.

@matt
You are correct of course I did say 500MB/s but further on I restate the value at 500 KB/s which is the real value. That mean I get 1 meg every 2 seconds.


My connection is fast enough for streaming as I stream all the time

I right click in fire fox, choose save as and them play the temporary .part file in VLc as it downloads.

A 2 hour movie at 1000MB usually comes in at 35 minutes. So yes I can stream

Any special reason why you ignored my suggestion?

Krieg Wrote:Any special reason why you ignored my suggestion?

Probably due to it's lack of link, emoticon and over punctuation. And because it makes too much sense.

I did follow your suggestion,
I am uncertain I didi it correctly however.

I created a file called ~/Library/Application\ Support/XBMC/UserData/advancedsettings.xml


I populated it with i<advancedsettings>
<skiploopfilter>8</skiploopfilter>
<samba>
<statfiles>false</statfiles>
</samba>
</advancedsettings>


The problem is I am not using samba over the network, I am using webdav or http

I also tried ftp and sshfs

What parameters do I put in in place of <samba>?

In the first post you said you tried Samba with bad results. Well, try Samba again. Then we can know if the problem is because of that or it is something else.

The parameter "statfiles" was implemented only for Samba and it is kind of a workaround. I still think there is a problem in that area and XBMC can't scale well with big collections until something else is implemented.

If browsing the files in Finder is already slow then XMBC will be even worse. The problem is that whenever you enter in a folder XBMC will read the extended attributes from EVERY file in the folder, and when you play the file XMBC will do it again.

Do you have many files per folder in the media server?