Video player - show how much has buffered?

[GJ51]

Video playback is a function of many dependencies in a chain. If any one of them is a weak link, then perormance will suffer. Upload speed is very important. So is download speed.

If you're transcoding at 5000kbps or 5Mbps then to keep up with the servers output you have to have at least 5Mbps upload speed and no other traffic taking away bandwidth. I always find you need to overestimate these things a bit, so for 5000kbps you really want about 10Mbps service going out.

Assuming that your getting the data out, you need to recieve it at the other end with comparable download speed.

In the early days of testing video playback I would travel about 400 miles away from home to visit relatives. They had reasonably good internet connection and I was able to get pretty good results. I then found that I would get different results depending on the playback hardware I was using. An older laptop with an older graphics card would buffer while a newer laptop would play just fine with no buffering. Both were using the same connection.

In most environments today you're seldom alone on the network. Any traffic bottleneck anywhere can foul things up. That's why hardware horsepower is so important whentranscoding and playing back video. A strong server on a gigabit lan connection with great internet service is a big plus. Even then if the other end only has 5Mbps service at the recieving end there can be buffering depending on how many hops it takes to get to the connection.

I have 35/35 Mbps FIOS internet service that consistently (we're talking anytime I test it consistent) tests at 43Mbps down and 35Mbps up. Even still I go on youtube and get buffering while playing youtube vids. I'm pretty sure they have some strong resources, so I don't think it's reasonable to expect that I'm going to do consistently better. Video is very demanding on CPU and bandwidth resources. Anything that isn't optimal can cause playback disruption.

I'll send you a link to my site so you can see how well it does at your end. I'm running a dual quad core Xeon sever, 16GB ram, dual gigabit NICS teamed, and FIOS internet. It's probably about as good as you'll see unless someone else has better upload speed, as I suspect that my upload speed is the slowest part of the chain and should handle the 5Mbps output without problems. Also test some mp4 files as they aren't transcoded. Select the videos folder and try different formats.

HTH

[DGalt]

Well so this is the issue...my upload speed is terrible (in the range of 2Mbps) thanks to being on cheap cable. I'm just trying to confirm where my bottleneck is since if it was a hardware issue I could do something about that...network issue, not so much (wishing FIOS would come to my area...).

Seeing as it seems to be the latter I'm back to my initial issue of having some type of indication of how much playback has already buffered. I looked into the utility that you suggested but haven't had much luck with it.

This is the MKV format diagram (in case in makes more sense to you than me):

http://www.matroska.org/technical/diagram/index.html

Not sure in which part index information is kept...reading it seems that they're in the Cueing Data component, which seems to be after the actual video / audio components. I'm going to try to contact the dev team at Matroska to see if they have any input on this

thanks for all your help

[GJ51]

You should still be able to get reasonable results by lowering the bitrate. Granted, you won't be getting Blue Ray quality or original frame rates, but you can still get pretty fair playback by throttling the frame rate through the player.

You have 2Mbps comming out of the server end, so try leaving the player at the default 1000kbps. If you still get buffering, try 700 or 500 until you see where it works best. One of the nice things about SS is that you can tailor the performance to get the most out of the infrastructure available.

The utility I mentioned is only for mp4 files.

[DGalt]

I'll play around with it and see what I can get...it's odd that I even get buffing for standard-quality rips though (480p-ish).

If the video buffers completely then the indication for how much has buffered shows up, which again seems to indicate an indexing issue (right?)