How does VLC play Samba-shared video files?

[jjulianf]

I have to Virtual Machines (Ubuntu 18.04) which are running on the same internal network.

The Server-VM stores a video in a folder which is shared to the Client-VM using Samba.

The bitrate of the video looks like this:



Now I use the VLC-player (version 3.0.3) to play this video on the Client-VM.

The thing I am wondering about:

Method A:

When the shared folder is mounted, it is available for the Client-VM under the path:

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/run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share:server=vm1server.local,share=testvideos/

I play the video from the command line with this command (which is the same like doing "Open file" in the VLC GUI):

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vlc /run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share:server=vm1server.local,share=testvideos/bbb_sunflower_2160p_60fps_normal.mp4

I get the following datarate in Wireshark:



Method B:

No matter if the shared folder is mounted, when I play the video with this command (which is the same like doing "Open network stream" in the VLC GUI):

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vlc smb://vm1server.local/testvideos/bbb_sunflower_2160p_60fps_normal.mp4

I get the following datarate in Wireshark:




Note that the datarate is more or less the same. Only at the beginning, I get 12Mbit/s in the first example and 140Mbit/s in the second one.

I used the standard cache settings, which are 300ms for file caching and 1000ms for network caching. But I played around with these values and the datarate always looked the same for Method B. The initial spike always had the same value and length.

Does anybody has an explanation for this behaviour?