I have a media server at home that I use to distribute media to players in the house. I have recently set up a VPN so that I can access my media remotely, but I have noticed something odd.
If I move a 45 minute video file from my media server to my laptop over the VPN, it takes 22 (ish) minutes, however, if I play the same video file (in VLC through a VPN accessed over a Windows Share, via VPN), it constantly (every 30-60 seconds) stutters and pauses and has to buffer.
I have tested the latency, and there is no downtime during a copy (copying at 300kbps constantly_ but at no point does the speed drop below 270kbps.
So, why does streaming playback do this when it could be copied faster than full playback?
p.s. When I want to play files remotely, I do copy them, this is more of a "but whhhyyyy?" question
Bandwidth is different than latency. For example, If I put a bunch of hard drives on a plane, I can move hundred of terabytes anywhere in the world in just a few hours. But the time to the first byte is also measured in hours. If I copied the data over the Internet, the time to first byte may be milliseconds, but it would take more than a few hours to move all the data.
VLC begins to play the file and it copies a few second worth of video, then stops downloading and begins playing, when that buffer is starting to run low, it goes back to the network to get more data, but if it takes longer to get that data then their is time left in the buffer, it stop. hence the term buffering. There should be a setting in VLC to increase the buffer (cache) size for high latency playback.
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