VLC Video Playback Over High Latency High Bandwidth Connection Incredibly Slow

[planedrop]

I've been doing some digging around online, but haven't been able to find any proper solution, if one exists, only others with the same issue.

I use VLC as my default media player, and sometimes I need to play back .mp4 files on SMB shares, this works 100% fine locally, but at as soon as I am accessing those same videos over SMB remotely via a VPN, they buffer like crazy, play for a few seconds, then stop and buffer again.

Now before someone jumps in and says this is because SMB is bad over high latency connections, you are right, and I am aware of this. However, Windows Photos and Windows Medial Player playback the files just fine, and this VPN I have setup can handle speeds in excess of 100Mb/s no problem over SMB when transferring files (and playing back the same files over Windows Photos doesn't stutter and sits around 80Mb/s usage). So the connection is perfectly capable of this and VLC is clearly the culprit, I'm wondering if I can tune anything to improve this though, as I hate most other media players, VLC is easy and "just works" for 99% of my needs.

Happy to fiddle with and tweak things to try and get to the bottom of this, if possible.

Greatly appreciate any input!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Windows, VLC uses the OS support for SMB. This is not suitable for streaming over high latency links because it cannot perform pipe-lining. VLC will play just fine if you download the file first.

To fix this, VLC would need a custom SMB implementation. Although feasible... it would break OS integration, notably single sign-on and would not work for mounted drive letters. So the cure would be worse than the disease, kind of.

For streaming, HTTP or FTP are preferable over SMB (or NFS, or any other networked file system protocol).