Video stutter when using external drive
- by psion
When using boxee to play video files off of an external western digital 1TB drive formatted NTFS, I notice a slight stutter in the video every 5-10 seconds. When using mplayer, it doesn't stutter as often, but it still stutters occasionally. If I play the video off of the local sata drive, it plays fine even in boxee. I use this computer as my HTPC and I just switched from windows to linux on it. In windows, I never had any sort of stutter playing movies from the drive. I am using the latest intel graphics drivers (for the intel GMA 950)
root@eee-htpc:/home/htpc# grep wd /etc/mtab
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/wd2 fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=512 0 0
I notice that despite trying to use ntfs or ntfs-3g, ubuntu uses ntfs-fuse which I've heard is slower.
/dev/sdb1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 80 MB in 3.07 seconds = 26.08 MB/sec
root@eee-htpc:/mnt/wd2# dd if=/dev/zero of=./120mb bs=1024 count=120000
root@eee-htpc:/mnt/wd2# time mv ./120mb /home/htpc
real 0m2.095s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m0.736s
Even though fuse has a reputation for being slow, it should easily be fast enough for playing standard definition video files.
So why the video stutter?
edit:
The issue seems to be overhead cpu usage from either playing off of a usb device or ntfs/fuse. Watching CPU usage with top, local files use 10-40% CPU. Watching the same video on the external formatted ntfs, it spikes to 170% (over 100% because of hyperthreading). To me it seems like it must be overhead from the fuse driver, though I don't know if it has more or less overhead than ntfs-3g.
It's a EEEBox B202 that has an atom 270, so not exactly the most powerful out there.
edit2:
I believe the solution would be to use non-fuse drivers or different fuse drivers. so far I have not been able to.
edit3:
I've probably edited this more times than I should, but as an update I have upgraded ntfs drivers to ntfs-3g 2010.8.8 external FUSE 28 - Third Generation NTFS Driver using the following PPA - ppa:x3lectric/team-iquik-releases. When first opening a video file in boxee that's on ntfs there's still the same amount of lag. After a few minutes of video, the lag seems to go away and the cpu usage comes down to 10-40%. Every so often though, it begins to stutter again. Also, if I skip ahead/back in the file, it begins to stutter a lot.
