3

I have setup a media center, running arch linux. I have also installed samba on it and have created users for all my roommates.

One of the biggest problems that we've faced is that if all of us are watching a movie at the same time, the stream becomes too laggy and some of us need to disconnect or stop streaming.

I was wondering if there was a way to compress the "connection" between the server and a computer?

1
  • Wired or wireless? In either case, tell us a lot about your hardware and configuration. What is the weak link? Is it the media center's CPU? The media center's hard drive? Is it network bandwidth? Mar 6, 2012 at 2:48

1 Answer 1

0

It looks like you pretty much found your answer here: https://serverfault.com/questions/366689/how-to-compress-smb

I read other places online talking about putting samba shares on a compressed filesystem, but I doubt that would be advantageous to you. You really do need to monitor the computer and see what the bottleneck is. If I had to take a wild guess not knowing anything about your setup, I'm going to assume you're doing it over wireless and either bandwidth or the router is the limiting factor. If this is the issue, one you guys are closer to the media center you could use an Ethernet cable directly between your machine and the media center. You could also try using multiple routers connected to the server with a switch.

This is a complete guess though. If your machine has low specs, the disk IO could be limiting it, or the CPU usage is topping off. You really have to look at things more closely when you're suffering from the lag.

Heck, you could always just pull a movie from the media center, watch it, then delete it, rather than trying to stream at the same time.

1
  • 7
    The answer that was "found" has been deleted :-(
    – minopret
    Sep 10, 2014 at 10:10

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .