Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Linux: NFS Video Streaming

As I've said earlier, all the new video devices do not need to have a media server running.  They can use various network protocols directly.  I have a very old Linux box, running Debian, that is packed with disks.  Actually, new disk servers seem to cost a fortune, and this is a good use for an old tower.

So I had this running well for a while, and suddenly a recent Debian upgrade threw me into a tizzy.  All my videos started to freeze while viewing.  As with all Linux problems, you look it up, and people have had this problem since 2008!  And no clear solution!  When that happens, it is always an obscure configuration problem, and nothing is more obscure than the NFS setup in /etc/exports.

So, screw that, and I found that Samba has more reliable video streaming.  I switched to that and haven't had a problem.  I still have the wdtv on nfs, so I found out that the option 'async' is required for nfs, and also that tcp/ip can be better.  Apparently Debian suddenly went to 'sync' as the default option.  I shall have to see how these option changes work on the wdtv.


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