Hi All,
I'm setting up a VoD solution at home, to stream movies recorded from digital TV to various PC's around the house.
I have setup Apache webserver v2.0.52 on a Win XP Home machine. I use VLC 8.1 on the client PC's.
A movie (mpeg2) can be anywhere from 2gB to 7gB in size and are recorded on to SATA 7200RPM Hard drives NTFS partitions.
On the client I enter http://movieserver:80//Movies/Movie.tp
I can succesfully stream 3 movies at the same time. The problem I am having is, irrespective of the size of the movie, If I try to stream more than 3 at the same time, some of the streams stop playing.
I have tried re-configuring the Apache httpd file but nothing I do affects the problem. I upgraded the network so all machines have 1gB network cards (Cat5e cabling) installed and are connected via a gigabit switch. The network utilization with 3 streams averages at 2% so I don't believe network bandwidth is an issue.
I can use VLC on the server to stream 8 concurrent movies using UDP to each individual client PC before I hit a disk bottleneck which can cause the movies to jutter. (CPU is a 3.2GhZPentium4 with 1mB cache, Ram 512kB) I tried increasing the server memory to 1gB but that also made no difference. CPU Util with 3 http streams 14%.
I read some documentation regarding Apache, suggesting that the following parameters were set in the httpd.conf file;
EnableMMap off
EnableSendfile off
Win32DisableAcceptex
With enablesend file off, the movies are cut short. In the VLC debug, the streamsize is reported incorrectly and an eof is received terminating the movie.
Has anybody else come across this 3 stream limit with Apache, and if so is there a solution other than chucking out XP and going with Linux?
Regards