Streaming outside local network, question

[WKleeven]

The network buffer is the one that would have the impact on view.....I just did all of mine to be consistent.

I also see you are using the mobile version of VLC. I don't have access to the VLC mobile....when I try to access it on the goggle store I get a message it isn't available for my country. I have a nightly build from June running on my tablet and it really sucks compared to what I am used to with the standard pc client. So you may be experiencing issue with the mobile version of VLC coupled with any limitations of video decoding on the mobile device.....i.e. you may be forced to use software decoding vs. hardware depending on your mobile device. I use MX Player on my tablet and after the stream is started I can open the network address in it and see a much better result on the video compared to VLC mobile (at least the version I have access too).

I think there's a confusion between portable and mobile. I don't have a mobile version of vlc, nor a tablet.
The portable version is a version made with (for example) thinapp. You don't have to install that version (but it runs on windows).

I worked with a portable version on my office, but on my client (laptop) and server (desktop) I have 2.0.7 from the videolan website:
http://get.videolan.org/vlc/2.0.7/win32/...-win32.exe

I will take my laptop to work on monday and test the buffer. I assume that I can tell the buffering is really taking place by having to wait for ..s before the video starts playing? I haven't noticed that with the portable version at work so maybe that didn't go right.

[UncleJohnsBand]

I think there's a confusion between portable and mobile. I don't have a mobile version of vlc, nor a tablet.
The portable version is a version made with (for example) thinapp. You don't have to install that version (but it runs on windows).

I worked with a portable version on my office, but on my client (laptop) and server (desktop) I have 2.0.7 from the videolan website:
http://get.videolan.org/vlc/2.0.7/win32/...-win32.exe

I will take my laptop to work on monday and test the buffer. I assume that I can tell the buffering is really taking place by having to wait for ..s before the video starts playing? I haven't noticed that with the portable version at work so maybe that didn't go right.

Thanks.... never realized there was a portable version.

Yes....if buffering on the client is working correctly you will see a delay in the start by x seconds....and I think you see a progress bar at the bottom of vlc showing the buffering completion level.

[WKleeven]

Thanks.... never realized there was a portable version.

Yes....if buffering on the client is working correctly you will see a delay in the start by x seconds....and I think you see a progress bar at the bottom of vlc showing the buffering completion level.

With a program like Thinapp you can make most windows applications portable. I sometimes find a portable version of a program on the web that I can use.

Well, I'm not sure which of the things I tried made the difference, but there is! I haven't tried how high can go, but it's much better than before. I have to test longer video's to see if it doesn't start buffering after all, but the first minutes seem okay (just 1x buffering).

If I remember well, I changed 2 things:
- One thing is I set the "streamer buffer size" to 10000ms in NEWA. I tried that before but maybe at that time I didn't know I had to press "update" for the change to be implemented but at the time I didn't notice anything different.
- The other thing is I set the transcode options just like you did UJB!

I'll try some more and let you know here. Thanks a lot for the help!

Wim

[UncleJohnsBand]

Great....thanks.....report back what you find out....

[WKleeven]

As of today no streaming at all, not even on local LAN....?
Could you please take a look at the logs?

Wim

[WKleeven]

I had the size set to 720x.. and now after I changed it to "scale 0.5" it works again..............??????.......

[WKleeven]

I don't understand. Today, sometimes I can but sometimes I can't stream. I'll attach the logs.

Wim

[UncleJohnsBand]

Looked at the log.... saw you are trying to stream a vob file...... I am not sure if that is a valid input file type.....

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=input

[WKleeven]

Looked at the log.... saw you are trying to stream a vob file...... I am not sure if that is a valid input file type.....

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=input

You can stream a vob file. However, I can't select subtitles (I can't, maybe it is possible, I don't know) nor can I control menus.

I changed the buffer in newa, that doesn't seem to make a difference. What is this buffer intended to do? Buffer on server or client side?
When I changed the transcode settings there was a big difference. With your settings I have little buffering, when setting video codec to mpg1 I have a lot of buffering. I thought the H.264 codec would be to much for the upload speed I've got, that's why I haven't started with this codec. Perhaps at 1 point I did try, but then I didn't know I had to push "update", so the codec wasn't used at all so I didn't notice an effect.

With settings: bitrate 512, size 720x480, it seems to work reasonably well. When I look at a video for 5 minutes (have to try at work, so I can't test much longer) I've got 1x buffering. In a few days I'm going on holidays (that's why I wanted to have the streaming functional), where I'm going to watch longer videos.

I'm not sure I haven't done anything else on the server or client, can't remember, but now when the client is buffering I see a yellow line progressing which I didn't see before. It's working now so I'll let it be like this but when I'm back home I'll reset vlc on both server and client and experiment some more.

So, it seems the codec made the difference.
Thanks for all the help.

Greetings,

Wim

[UncleJohnsBand]

The H.264 codec will take horsepower on the server but the resulting stream is not heavy in regards to data as it is compressed. If your processor on the server can handle it I would recommend using it.

You may also want to play around with Windows Media player client(just change the setting on the stream pop-up).... discovered by accident on my Windows 8 machine it does a great job of playing the stream....

I am researching the buffer setting. This was put in a loooong time ago before VLC was even an 1.x product. At one time there was an http buffer setting and then in one of the upper 0.9x releases it stopped working (found various bug posting on the issue) so at that point I disabled it in EWA (version of NEWA that was with GBPVR).

I have spent a good 6 or so hours Googlenating and combing the VLC forums.

With the 2.x release of VLC they "simplified" the caching options.... from the change log....

* The 40+ --*-caching options were simplified and dumbed down to 4 options:
- --file-caching specifies caching for local files,
- --network-caching specifies caching for network resources,
- --live-caching specifies caching for capture devices and
- --disc-caching specifies caching for local optical media.

I have a direct post on the forum now to see if there is still the ability to enable a cache that occurs on the server that sits between the transcoded content and the streaming on the http port. My guess is not.

This simply means that you need to enable the caching on the client receiving the content (already discussed earlier in this thread).

You will see varying results based on source being transcoded (some stuff doesn't take a lot of energy to convert while others do), traffic on your network from the server to your outgoing internet connection, traffic on the internet between your internet connection and where the client is and the ability of the client to decode/render the stream.

I will post back what I find out.