16

Is there a way to tell VLC to buffer a file on a remote PC so as to play uninterrupted with the channel's average bandwidth?

I set network latency to high, but I wish there was more I could do.

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
Matt
  • 6,539

4 Answers4

6

In my VLC 3.0.4 I just go to Settings, switch Show Simple to Show All, click to Input/Codecs and scroll down to the last section "Advanced". And here we are, "File Cache", "Disk cache", "Network data cache". It looks like you need the last one or perhaps the first one depends on how you open your remote file.

Egor
  • 61
4

Try changing VLC preferences "Show Settings" from Simple to All. Then navigate to Input / Codec -> Access Module -> SMB and change Caching Value in MS to 30000. See this article for examples. That will cache 30 seconds of video

For the current 2.0 and 3.0 branch of VLC it has been renamed to "Network Caching (ms)". Navigate to Tools -> Preferences -> Show Settings ALL -> Input/Codex and scroll down on the right hand pane to "Advanced"

enter image description here

charlesbridge
  • 1,357
0

Similar to other answers, but two extra steps which I never realized! Mainly that you may have to restart VLC for changes to take effect, and you may need modify the File, Disc, or Network caching preferences depending on how exactly you're giving the media to VLC.

With VLC 3.0.20:

  1. Select Tools→Preferences→Show settings→All→Input / Codecs
  2. Scroll down to Advanced section, then change the caching value that affects your particular media.
  3. Restart VLC. VLC Cache Preferences

To figure out which caching value affects your particular media, make each caching value unique and use the Open Media dialog.

  1. Follow steps above to make each caching value unique, for example 1001, 302, 303, and 10004 ms for File, Live capture, Disc, and Network caching, respectively. (Those are the default values, but changing last digit to 1/2/3/4 ms).
  2. Restart VLC.
  3. Select Media→Open Disc→Show more options
  4. Click the tab for your particular media type to see which caching value is getting applied from your preferences.

VLC Open Media Dialog

I personally found out that it doesn't seem to matter whether my media was on the network or on my local computer, I had to use Disc caching for both. My network media is a folder backup from my NAS via SMB mapped to a Windows drive letter (folder backup is similar to an ISO, but just the raw VIDEO_TS / BDMV / etc folders as exported by MakeMKV). I spent a bunch of time editing the Network setting, buying a USB-C ethernet dongle and running LAN network cables, testing on different computers, and so on, without ever realizing that VLC was ignoring the Network setting entirely.

To realize that restarting VLC was necessary, I changed all four caching values between 1 ms and the max 60000 ms caching value. The max made VLC take a noticeable amount of time to re-buffer after jumping to a new position in my media. But only after restarting! Same thing when reducing the buffer from 60000 ms to 1 ms; the buffering still took a very long time until I restarted VLC.

Micah Lindström
  • 254
0

well, after several attempts, i gave up for now and solved this this way:

cd /var/tmp
wget http://192.168.1.15/ts/0 &
vlc /var/tmp/0

This way the stream is saved to disk and vlc can pause and go back. even if you get any problem with the increasing file and time (like trying to forward to the end and it change), just restart vlc (if it didn't restarted itself) and scroll to the position you were

No perfect but it works

higuita
  • 560