Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Offloading HDDs and other functions to remote NAS or servers is increasingly popular
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Daravon
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Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Post by Daravon » Sat Sep 29, 2012 7:48 pm

For all the people that play media files off nfs...do you use regular fast ethernet?

I just set up a HTPC and video playback is not smooth when playing back DVD iso files with XBMC. The files are on an NFS share on my server. Could network speed be the problem? Do you need gigabit ethernet for this kind of thing?

I ran and terminated the Cat5e wires myself so given my natural self-doubt, I'm wondering if there is a problem with the wires and I'm not even getting full fast-ethernet speeds. Is there an easy test I can run?

Vicotnik
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Re: Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Post by Vicotnik » Sun Sep 30, 2012 2:32 am

Are you unable to play a file from the HTPC locally?

For everything but very high bitrate HD material 100Mbit should be more than enough.

Daravon
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Re: Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Post by Daravon » Sun Sep 30, 2012 6:34 am

I copied a file locally to the SSD and found that playback was not improved. I also did the following test and found about 12Mb/s read speed.

chaz@argus:~$ time dd if=stuff/dummyfile of=/dev/null bs=16k
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 23.2691 s, 11.5 MB/s

real 0m23.281s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.336s

boost
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Re: Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Post by boost » Sun Sep 30, 2012 7:45 am

I'm not using XMBC, with VLC 100Mbit is fast enough to play 1:1 Blu-ray rips from a HP Microserver for me, while wlan g wasn't.
If the playback doesn't improve from a local source I guess it's XMBC.
Can you play the file (locally and nfs) with VLC?
I'll download XMBC and check if it works for me.
Just checked with XMBC via Windows Network (from Samba) not NFS both DVD and Blu-ray rips play fine.

washu
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Re: Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Post by washu » Sun Sep 30, 2012 8:18 am

Max bitrate for DVD is about 10 mbit/sec, so 100 mbit network should have no problem. Since you can't play locally, make sure your video drivers are installed properly. Make sure you are NOT using the "VESA" driver in X.

Daravon
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Re: Is fast ethernet 'fast enough' for HTPC nfs share?

Post by Daravon » Sun Sep 30, 2012 11:09 am

Earlier I had no luck playing DVD ISOs with the mplayer packaged by Ubuntu, so I followed some blogger's guide on compiling it.

Now my video is perfectly fine with mplayer. So I think I have an XBMC problem rather than a hardware problem. I could just use mplayer, but I wanted XBMC so my wife could handle the HTPC (she doesn't do bash). Any suggestions?

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