[JohnnyD2]

For anyone stumbling across this thread looking for a solution, I have one which may work in a small number of cases.

If your XBMC is on Windows, on wi-fi and on Vista or Windows 7, you should disable all the fancy meta-data reading that Windows itself does.

Specifically I found that turning on 'Show icons not thumbnails' resolved my issue with stuttering video. (Here's a nice screenshot version: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-v...-explorer/ - if you can't see the Organize menu, try pressing Alt.)

You might speed things up further by turning off the navigation panes and other Vista/7 Explorer bloat, but that was the single setting which worked for me.

If you're still having problems you should see if your network is fast enough - use this little tool to monitor your bandwidth. If you see spikes which drop to 0 then everything should be ok. If you see something that looks like a mountain range (constant throughput with peaks) then your network probably isn't fast enough.

On-topic regarding a buffer, it's silly not to have a 20-sec one. Network transfer can burp for any number of reasons - even on 10Gb cable - and having a mini buffer to dip into makes a lot of sense in the same way DVD-burning does. Mostly my DVD burn buffer is 85-95%. Now and then it drops to 50, then climbs back within 5 seconds.

But without the write buffer burning would've paused, the DVD would be ruined and I'd have a coaster.

Cheers,

John

[ScrapMaker]

How can anyone keep a straight face when they repeatedly exclaim that increased buffers are a bad idea? With my temporary Wireless G setup, I can watch a 2 hour, 16GB 1080p MKV with 6 buffering instances throughout the entire film. I only need 18mbps to watch this movie, in theory. Clearly WiFi fluctuates and a small buffer (which would not cause a delay in watching the movie,) would smooth over problems like that.

I'm surprised this hasn't been implemented yet, becuase I used to enjoy this feature on the original Xbox XBMC.

[XMBC_FREAK]

I have a good idea that has helped me before I went to hard wiring the entire house.

GET BETTER ROUTERS.

I hate to say it but most routers suck and most have el cheapo routers anyway!!!!
I don't really see anyone speaking of modding a router or ping times and what they mean to you.

Either get a Nice decent router with a large amount of ram, or goto to a custom firmware like DDWRT TOmato router, x86 router, or professional grade router.

These routers will allow you to adjust many settings to get your wifi network just right. Another thing is antennas directional omnidirectional yagi and more...

Wifi can be tricky but the better equipment the better the signal, I am not saying everyone is doing this but why expect 100 percent results from crappy wifi equipment and cards.

Also plaster homes vs drywall homes have a very different result. I will always hard wire a plasterwalled home enough said.

Just a thought of those who keep struggling with wifi. The only thing I have on wifi are the tablet remotes that run the house other than that everything is hardwired now. Since the change I have a better experience with the entire house.

You do realize wifi cause brain activity to change. Anyway food for thought.

[francoiscn]

I'm in the same boat trying to figure out how to adjust the buffer. The advanced settings method seems to do nothing at all.

I've never had a single issue with streaming on the TV from my office computer via VLC with 15 second buffer but I regularly have buffer issues with XBMC. So maybe getting a better router would help, but there is still room for improvement in XBMC.

[TouchMyBox]

I was thinking it would be cool if XBMC would download an entire film onto it's local storage while playing a movie. In my case, I have a FreeNAS machine with 6 hard drives which store all of my media. If XBMC were to buffer everything onto my HTPC, then that would allow my hard drives to spin down sooner and thus causing less power consumption.

Just a thought.

[GJones]

I was thinking it would be cool if XBMC would download an entire film onto it's local storage while playing a movie. In my case, I have a FreeNAS machine with 6 hard drives which store all of my media. If XBMC were to buffer everything onto my HTPC, then that would allow my hard drives to spin down sooner and thus causing less power consumption.

Just a thought.

The problem is that, the more you "need" buffering, the longer you will wait. Keep in mind that the power you save spinning down the FreeNAS hard drive will likely be consumed spinning up and writing to the local drive. You have also completely saturated the slow network link (the cause of the need for the buffer to begin with) by pulling over the entire movie instead of a smaller piece. There are better solutions out there to use less power and not re-engineer the whole system.

A simple UnRaid solution lets all the other drives spin down appropriately while still offering great read performance. General RAID systems are not designed with spin-down in mind. This is why they generally are not targeted at home systems.

[Ned Scott]

am I the only one who sees this?:

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Use...network.3E

It was added to the wiki on December 10th 2010. I think you guys all just got trolled for a year.

[maruchan]

@Ned: That's in-ram buffering, not buffering-to-disk. The difference is huge on platforms with limited amounts of RAM, such as the ATV2.

[jkommeren]

I can't believe this is still a matter of discussion tbh.

You see the thing is, the buffer size is fine, when you're streaming dvdrips over your lan / wlan or even vpn. Or even an iso.

But because it's not set as a percentage of the bitrate of the video (or as you will, a buffer in Seconds) , but as a static number in KB, it's bound to run into problems as bitrates increase.

once you try to jump to 1080p, with a bitrate 20 times as high, you'll be 20 times more likely to notice "speed bumps"

Please fix this. XBMC is the *only* player I can think of atm which cannot set it's buffersize properly. Yes even WMP has it (since version 8!!) , and VLC has had it for a couple of months as well, of which I'd least expected it.

Advancedsettings.xml doesn't really work for me, I tried setting it to 500mb (so that's 500 with another 6 zeros in bytes) and to 50 but when I pause the vid and watch the networktraffic it flatlines in 2 seconds. I have 4gigs of ram of which 2 are available. It seems to respond to the settings, but the difference is minimal. When it's buffering it takes 4 seconds to go to 100. With 1 megabyte per second I'd say the size is actually about 4 megabytes. Every idiot can figure out that's not enough.

FYI I'm streaming over a VPN, with fiber on both ends. Problem appears to be the latency (~20ms). Playback's mostly fine, but it's really sensitive. No problems with other players.

[Ned Scott]

@Ned: That's in-ram buffering, not buffering-to-disk. The difference is huge on platforms with limited amounts of RAM, such as the ATV2.

Yeah, but a bunch of people here have been asking for any control over the buffer. That setting was added to the wiki shortly after this discussion started.

[Ned Scott]

No current XBMC dev wants to add it. Patches welcome. Begging isn't.

[Ned Scott]

Setting <advancedsettings><network><cachemembuffersize>0</cachemembuffersize></network></advancedsettings> in advancedsettings.xml (wiki) for XBMC v12 (Frodo) will now write the cache to disk rather than RAM.

[benobee]

Setting <advancedsettings><network><cachemembuffersize>0</cachemembuffersize></network></advancedsettings> in advancedsettings.xml (wiki) for XBMC v12 (Frodo) will now write the cache to disk rather than RAM.

Hi there

First time post so my apologies if I've missed something along the way here.

Regarding Ned's quote above, what would be the default location on the hard drive for this local disk cache?

If I want to write this local cache to a specific folder on the hard drive, how would this be configured?

And finally, does this tweak work on Eden v11, or only Frodo v12?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Cheers

Ben

[jfry]

I'm trying to figure out if the issue I'm having is the same issue mentioned in this post. I have a widget for wimp.com I can watch 5-6 videos and after that clicking on another video does nothing. I close and reopen xbmc, after which I can watch another 5-6 videos. Over and over.

I have 4GB Ram on this HTPC which is dedicated to xbmc. My connection is wired and my internet speed is consistently 5mb.

Thanks in advance.

[David.P]

I think my issue fits here.

Strangely, when I start a movie (being stored as *.MP4 on my NAS, which in turn is accessed via WLAN @ about 6mbps and SMB protocol), by hitting "Enter" on the movie list, often only the audio part of the movie starts playing, and the movie selection list in XBMC stays open:



...and the video is not played (only the audio).

If I press "Enter" a second time on the same movie in the list, then the list closes, and the movie starts playing properly.

What could be the reason for this behaviour? Caching problems? Slow WLAN and/or NAS access?

Once started, the movie plays perfectly, jumping forward and back in the movie is instantly.

Thanks for any help.