The VideoLAN Forums

Hi Everyone,

I've got a problem which I'm sure can be addressed with the great features of VLC. I'm just not good enough to find how to do it by myself

My videos (mostly divx, 350 MB) are stored on a home NAS. This network storage is very slow: it takes around 7 minutes to copy a 350 MB divx from it on my PC. My problem is that rather than downloading the file on my PC before playing it with VLC (and wait 7 minutes !), I'd like to read it directly from the NAS. But if I open the video in VLC using a local mapped drive to the NAS, the video is dead slow, freezes, etc... So opening the video directly in real-time doesn't seem a good option.

The video takes 7 min to download and is about 40 minutes. This means it downloads much faster than it is played. Therefore, I don't really understand why accessing it directly causes problems. I would think that a small cache of a few MB could be created during the first few seconds, and then it should be enough to start reading the video fluidly until the end. That's where my knowledge ends... Is there a feature in VLC that would allow this ? Maybe using streaming ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated !

try to increase you smb caching or try to access it through HTTP

I did this and now I can watch over slow network:

preferences:

Input / Codecs -> Access Modules -> File -> (click Advanced) -> Caching value changed to 10000

Thanks for the tip!
Works like a charm for wireless video streaming.

I'm watching the same sort of video files mentioned before on a wireless laptop ; mostly 'Lost' episodes I missed on TV and downloaded, 40 mins. and about 350Mb (HDTV?).
I first tried to play them back directly from the NAS (SMB share) using VLC on the laptop, but got little 'hangs' every couple of minutes. Then I tried streaming the files from the NAS using my (wired) server on the LAN to the laptop IP-address. Then I got little break-ups (large blocky pixels) ...

Just tried upping the 'caching value in ms', first to 600, then 1000 and now 1200 and now there's hardly any stutter! Also the 'lost frames' (video) and 'lost buffers' (audio) I saw in the statistics in 'stream and media info' are completely gone.

Used Linux to experiment, but I'm sure this will work in Windows too (I'm using a dual-boot PC with VLC in Windows and Mandriva Linux).