[mythtv] mythmusic caching mp3 files

[Dave]

I recently spent a long time fiddling with my 802.11g network and
discovered a few things...

The wireless card and AP seem to constantly try to negotiate speeds
based (i guess) on signal strength. For me, this killed throughput, and
caused most connections to appear to 'hang'. This 'hanging' or
'stalling' if you like would eventually fix itself but that could take
over a minute. If you take the client card down and bring it back up
again by hand it would start working again straight away so the AP wasnt
actually crashed.

I experimented with (among other things) setting the maximum bit-rate on
the client card, which proved to be very sucessfull. In the end, for my
setup, if I set the card to limit the negotiated rate to 18Mb or below
(ie. never try to go higher), I could get very reliable throughput at
18Mb. (scp'ing files gets about 1.4MB/sec).

Whilst this may be a long way off the theoretical 54Mb, it worked out
great for myth as it is enough for me to watch live TV (which for me is
SD DVB-t which seems to use ~1MB/sec).

The moral of the story is try 'rate limiting' on either the client card
or the AP, your 'crashes' might just go away. To do this in linux, with
a card that fully supports 'linux wireless extensions' you can use
iwconfig e.g.:

iwconfig eth1 rate 18000000 auto

Read the manpage to learn more, some cards/drivers may have other
methods to achieve this.

Dave







On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 16:57, Fa Yoeu wrote:
> I have a weird problem that when I try to play mp3 from my nfs mounted
> directory through mythmusic, it causes the access point (netgear
> 802.11g) to crash.  I have to powercycle the AP to get it working
> again.  I am suspecting that it is because of incompatibilities
> between different brands of 802.11g, but I am not sure yet.  Also many
> times the music cuts and skips because of other traffic.  So I wanted
> to hack mythmusic cache entire files before playback, doing the
> following, copy mp3 file from the nfs directory to a local directory
> before starting to play the file.  Anyone  have any suggestions before
> I begin hacking?
> 
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