[mythtv-users] Samba or NFS?

[Sasha Z]

Well, I just did some testing of NFS vs. samba.

With smb, I got slight pauses throughout the movie when another
machine on the network bothered the samba server. While not a terribly
big deal, it was annoying. Using NFS, everything was buttery smooth.

With smb, movies started faster. This is barely noticeable with movies
<2GB, the difference is so close to nothing it doesn't matter. With
movies over 2GB, smb start time (mplayer indexing) was still very
fast. With NFS, small movies loaded almost (several ms difference) as
fast as smb, but seeking during the movie was smoother. With large
movies like das boot, at 2.8GB, NFS took a disturbingly long time to
load the movie, around 20 seconds while mplayer was indexing, but it
worked well once started. With smb, once started, I couldn't seek to a
percentage in the movie, though time seeking seemed to work. With NFS,
percentage seeking works great.

Considering the majority of my movies are under 2GB, I'm sticking with
NFS. Even if they were all 2GB, I think I would still stick with NFS,
but that would be a tougher call.