The VideoLAN Forums

I put this in general because I don't believe it is limited to an OS and it is about a combination with samba.

Here's the situation:

I keep my files on a debian server, and share them to my windows PC with samba, where I play them with VLC. Because my samba shares/harddisks on the server are fairly busy, I use a script to kick samba connections which use too many threads (5 or more) to download or stream (it is currently not possible to limit this with samba). Here's the catch: Streaming with VLC opens more than a 140 threads to read the files.

Is there a way to limit the amount of threads? preferably, I would like it to use only 1 thread.

Further study shows that this happens with x264 mkv's but not with avi's. That leads me to believe it is not a problem with windows or samba...

Don't use file formats that requires lots of seeks... not much we can do about this. We only open one file handle per input, but we do seek a lot if the format requires it. The rest is not within VLC's control.

Thanks for your answer.

However, I tested Media Player Classic (with ffdshow) and this does not open an excessive number of threads for the x264 file. I really wish to play my files with VLC again, but the current situation makes that just impossible. Perhaps I could (or should) submit a bug report?

You can. But with no further informations, it's not likely to be fixed.

You can. But with no further informations, it's not likely to be fixed.

Can you tell me what kind of information you would need?

I don't even know. VLC only opens a single file handle. To me it makes no sense that it would spawn countless threads on the server.

After further investigation, i have found out that the information stated in my first post was incorrect (sorry about the confusion): After opening an mkv, vlc opens _all_ mkv's in the directory, just one thread per mkv. A directory with only 1 mkv opens only 1 thread. Would you know anything about this? A sequential scan of all files in the directory perhaps? (in this case samba would list this incorrectly as simultaneous threads, i've seen samba do this before)
I have things like VLC's media library turned off, so I would think it is not scanning for that reason...

A similar effect occurs if thumbnail view is used in windows, however for this very reason I have it disabled.