The VideoLAN Forums

Hello, Can anyone verify this information.

I've setup a channel listing for a DirectShow TV Tuner card and it works fine except it seems to allocate a lot of memory for each channel switch from the PlayList and even more memory for each channel switch from the http interface.

Playlist increases the memory by about 500k, the http channel switch increases memory use by about 2000k. Is there a way to release the prior stream buffers in the streaming server and the player when you switch channels on the same UDP address and the same input source?

-- ggunners

How did you do the DirectShow channel playlist and how do you use the HTTP interface to change a channel (remote from the host PC)?
Thanks.

See this thread...

viewtopic.php?t=10783&highlight=dshow+tuner

-- ggunners

An update on this memory issue. The Windows Task Manager shows the memory allocation for vlc server or client continuing to grow as channels are changed on the dshow device.

However, if you minimize vlc, the Task Manager will report a deallocation of memory back down to about 8 meg of memory from sometimes 30 to 50 meg of memory. Whether this is an actual memory indication or an error in Windows reporting is unknown.

If you run a vlc streaming server minimized it stays around 8 meg.

-- ggunners

Success! Was able to run a VLC streaming server from an ATI TV Tuner card to a UDP multicast stream for over 19 hours with very little increase in memory utilization. The trick was to minimize VLC while streaming. It only grew from about 8Meg of memory use to 15Meg of memory use in 19 houres. All other tests had VLC running with Win2K using up all available memory and crashing sometime within 12 hours.

Perhaps one of the developers can check into when the memory garbage collection is happening, in this case on the "On_Minimize" will release memory. Perhaps that needs to be called more often while the application is maximized or has focus. Or maybe just a timer that garbage collects when a new item is selected from a Playlist. Just a thought...

-- ggunners