Caching & catchup playing video over NFS

I’ve seen this behaviour on a variety of files over the the last year, but it’s taken me a while to try replicating and uploading logs.

Issue is that video files played over NFS seem to pause briefly, before rushing to ‘catch up’ for a few seconds. Happens at different points with different files, and sadly isn’t reliable at a given point for any given file (one of the reasons I haven’t rushed to open a topic).

First log uploaded demonstrates the issue happening within the first 15 minutes of a 112 minute file, at about 13:30, and there’s a warning from CDVDMessageQueue that certainly corresponds. In something of a new development, on this occasion, the behaviour exhibited itself three times in quick succession, when I’m used to it happening jusst once.
Second log uploaded is the same video file played locally on the Vero 1, and it gets past the point above without issue. That’s not necessarily meaningful, as the same file played without issue to about 80 minutes over NFS in the recent past ('fraid I didn’t have debug logging enabled on this occasion). I’m sorry for the size of the log, but I felt the need to be comprehensive.

I’m open to the possibility that something needs tuning on either the NFS mount (achieved using fstab, so the kernel drivers I believe), or even on my NAS server, but I can’t work that out on my own, & would appreciate any guidance. I can see previous instances of similar issues but that thread seemed to die at discussion of iperf, and I can’t quickly establish how to install that on my NAS.

FileInfo:
General
Complete name : C:\temp\Take The Lead (2006).avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 746 MiB
Duration : 1 h 52 min
Overall bit rate : 930 kb/s
Writing application : VirtualDubMod 1.5.4.1 (build 2178/release)
Writing library : VirtualDubMod build 2178/release

Video
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings, BVOP : 1
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Custom
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 1 h 52 min
Bit rate : 475 kb/s
Width : 544 pixels
Height : 304 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 25.000 FPS
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.115
Stream size : 381 MiB (51%)
Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Mode extension : CM (complete main)
Format settings, Endianness : Big
Codec ID : 2000
Duration : 1 h 52 min
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 448 kb/s
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 31.250 FPS (1536 spf)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 360 MiB (48%)
Alignment : Split accross interleaves
Interleave, duration : 96 ms (2.40 video frames)
Interleave, preload duration : 96 ms
Language : English

From the information I’ve provided, does this look worth anyone’s time to assist?

Hi

I’m sorry to hear you are having some playback issues. Thanks for providing detailed logs and information, this is quite helpful.

The NFS library Kodi uses will always have worse performance than a kernel based mount, as the kernel performs readahead and the library does not work. We always ship the latest libNFS and improvements (chunk size) as a result to try and counteract this.

My recommendation is to try an /etc/fstab based NFS mount, and let us know if you have any problems with this. I suspect it will clear things up for you. You can search the forum for information on how to do this, but if you need help on how to do this, just let us know.

Sam

Thanks Sam: reading through that, I think you may have led me to an important realisation. I am mounting the NAS via /etc/fstab (listing below), but when adding media sources, I’m using the NFS browsing option, which I guess means the NFS library in Kodi. Don’t know if you’re telling me that’s what I’m doing based on the logs, but I’ll need to export my media library whilst playing around with a change of source, so please bear with me if it takes a couple days to come back to this thread (bit unfair when your response is so fast!)

nas01:/share/Qmultimedia /home/osmc/NAS nfs rw,rsize=4096,wsize=4096,hard,intr,async,nodev,nosuid 0 0

Only one test run, but having changed my media sources to use the mount point listed in fstab, no stuttering was observed. Hopefully that’ll be it. Always good to hear it’s a user issue, eh?

Glad to hear it. Let us know if you have any troubles