Our machines dual-boot Windows 10. I switched to it, used a file manager to go to the network drive, right-clicked a video file and selected start it with VLC. VLC started and immediately started playing the file from the remote drive, without any local download. The Win10 VLC is configured same as the packman version. The fields you cite above are all blank in the Win10 VLC. Spousal unit used Win10 until about a year ago, and used the procedure described here to watch videos. She’s on openSUSE now, so this new bug is an issue.
Regards,
Just to clarify, I only used Windows 10 as a file server for testing vlc in my openSUSE environment. Even though I had guest access configured on the Windows host, I still needed to provide dummy credentials. It was only a quick test and I didn’t investigate it any further. I tested with vlc from the packman repo.
I understand what you did. I am curious whether VLC streamed the file from the Windows host, or downloaded the file to a local cache.
VLC access to the external drive has never been a problem. What changed after recent updates was VLC’s downloading the file instead of playing it while the file stayed on the network drive.
To explore the idea in another thread that ffmpeg was the problem, I switched ffmpeg from the packman 3.4.5 version to 3.4.4 from the openSUSE repository, along with nine dependency downgrades. VLC then gave the error:
Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format “mp4v” (MPEG-4 Video)
but you probably knew that.
I switched ffmpeg back to packman, and downgraded VLC to 3.0.6 from the openSUSE repository. That played remote videos without codec error, but VLC still began downloading the file to local cache.
~> vlc --version
VLC media player 3.0.9.2 Vetinari (revision 3.0.9.2-0-gd4c1aefe4d)
VLC version 3.0.9.2 Vetinari (3.0.9.2-0-gd4c1aefe4d)
Compiled by abuild on obs-build (Apr 16 2020 12:00:00)
Compiler: gcc version 7.5.0 (SUSE Linux)
This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License;
see the file named COPYING for details.
Written by the VideoLAN team; see the AUTHORS file.
~> ffmpeg --version
ffmpeg version 3.4.5 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 7 (SUSE Linux)
I see this was between 3.0.8 and 3.0.9.Does libsmb2 apply to only Linux and not Windows?
Changes between 3.0.8 and 3.0.9:
Added libsmb2 support for SMB2/3 shares
I did more testing. These machines dual-boot Leap 15.1 and Windows 10. I booted Win10 and ran VLC on the same file as I had done in Leap. It ran quickly and smoothly. The Leap instance had significant pauses and distortions. Also, the Leap VLC downloaded at about three times the speed of the Win10 version. I first tested Win10 VLC 3.0.8. To check the libsmb2 change, I updated Win10 to 3.0.10 and it again ran properly.
There was also a VLC change
Changes between 3.0.7.1 and 3.0.8:
Stream filter:
Improve network buffering
that might have caused the issue.
To check further, I restored a system image from 18 March 2020 that had VLC 3.0.7.1-pm151.6.5.8. That ran properly. I then updated only VLC (and its dependencies) to 3.0.9.2-pm151.6.8.1, and the poor performance was back.
VLC 3.0.10
improves DVD, macOS Catalina, adaptive streaming, SMB and AV1 support
so I’m hoping it may restore the proper performance.
I suspect a significant contributor is network speed. With at fast network, VLC probably has no problem. Our hardware is a bit old and slow. Linux VLC 3.0.7 did fine transferring at about 0.5 MiB/s. However Linux VLC 3.0.9 worked poorly at 2 MiB/s. In contrast, Win10 VLC 3.0.10 worked well at 0.6 MiB/s. The Win10 VLC looked like it was transferring in discrete batches, whereas Linux VLC was a steady rate.
Best regards,
Improve network buffering
Forum advice was
If you are using SMB with low latency and low bandwidth, you should reduce the prefetch-read-size setting.
VLC 3.0.7.1 has a prefetch read size of 16384 (=2^14). VLC 3.0.8 changed to a prefetch read size of 16777216 (=2^24). Our network hardware must fall into the low latency and low bandwidth category. In VLC 3.0.9.2, I changed prefetch-read-size to 16384, and performance is OK again.