SMB Streaming issues in Dharma - Using NFS for better streaming

One thing I have noticed about Dharma (and I presume it's actually more to do with the underlying lucid lynx than Dharma per se, althought I don't know) - is MUCH greater flakiness with low quality networks, like wireless and Ethernet over Power.

My Camelot set up happily streamed all 720p and almost all 1080p without glitches using Ehtnet over Power (EoP). On the same hardware, same network, Dharma can barely manage 720p, with regular buffering issues. 1080p - fuggedaboutit!

There are quite a few reports of this, not a lot of solutions to date though. I suspect it's to do with default SMB mounting options and an overly small buffer or something, but in general SMB is not known to be a wonderfully efficient protocol. It also means tht you need to use Windows name resolving which can be painfully slow at times, so all in all, it's not perfect.

The solution seems to be to use NFS rather than SMB to share the files.

With this here I can reliably stream 720p and while 1080p may buffer a bit at the beginning it seems to settle down (I’ve only tried it for 10 mins or so, as the second machine is not really a machine I actually use much, it’s really more for my wife and kids to use during the day!). This is with my power net thingy showing an amber or red signal, not green – so medium to bad connection (40 to 80 mb). In all this is at least as good as with Camelot now I’d say. This was all tested while my wife was watching 720p stuff on the main machine too so the network was being kept busy with that as well.

I think this is the best option but the Openelec people are looking at SMB sharing issues as ewll.

So, to try it isn’t that hard:

Basically, you run a little utility on your Windows server called Hanewin NFS (http://www.hanewin.net/nfs-e.htm)

Install that and then you go into the start menu, run the little administrator proggy
(Hanewin->NFS->NFS Server (right click and choose run as administrator).

On the exports tab, set up your shares:

“Full path on your server” –name:WhateverWithoutSpaces –public

Like so:

"F:\Movie Library 01" -name:MovieLibrary01 -public
"G:\Movie Library 02" -name:MovieLibrary02 -public
"M:\Movie Library 03" -name:MovieLibrary03 -public
"H:\TV Library 03" -name:TVLibrary03 -public
"I:\TV Library 04" -name:TVLibrary04 -public
"J:\TV Library 05" -name:TVLibrary05 -public
K:\ -name:Store06 -public
K:\Thumbnails -name:Thumbnails -public
"K:\Music Library" -name:MusicLibrary –public

Save the file, and restart the server using the button on that tab, and you should see a list of your shares come up if you did it right (under the Directory column).

In the Start->Hanewin->NFS, choose ‘Start NFS Server’ and ‘Start SunRPC Port Daemon’. This gets it actually going. Turn off you Windows Firewall for you internal network. Leave it on for the external network, but there’s no real issue turning it of inside your own network really. You can probably bind some specific ports and open only those if you want, but let's keep this simple for now.

Now, mount them on your Openelec machine using netmount.conf.

nfs | serverIP:/ShareNameNoSpacesAsInHanewinExportsFile |/storage/mount/Whatever You Like

nfs | 192.168.1.51:/Thumbnails | /storage/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/MovieLibrary01 | /storage/mount/Movie Library 01
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/MovieLibrary02 | /storage/mount/Movie Library 02
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/MovieLibrary03 | /storage/mount/Movie Library 03
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/TVLibrary03 | /storage/mount/TV Library 03
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/TVLibrary04 | /storage/mount/TV Library 04
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/TVLibrary05 | /storage/mount/TV Library 05
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/Store06 | /storage/mount/Store 06
nfs | 192.168.1.51:/MusicLibrary | /storage/mount/Music Library

Reboot your machine and the shares should come up. Everything should be much snappier and more reliable if my network here is any guide.

(Note I have got my .xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails folder on a network share now – so with the MySQL db, watched status/thumbnails etc, are all brought in from the server and will survive upgrades etc.)

The NFS shares seem to connect more quickly at start up too, so so far I haven’t found any issues at all.

I'm now using NFS on both our boxes and so far it's noticeably more responsive (particularly with things like looking at photos), and much reduced buffering with PoE to our second machine (our main machine is using ethernet so this wasn't an issue).