[wplug] XMMS skipping over wireless

[Carl Benedict]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 03:32, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:
> I'm experimenting with storing all my mp3s on a central fileserver and 
> listening to them remotely over a wireless network.  This seems reasonable 
> to me since even top-of-the-line mp3s are only 320 kilobits per second, 
> while my wireless network is supposed to be 11 Mbits.
> 
> Indeed, I have no problem with this on my desktop machine which runs 
> Windows 2000 (and a 6-year-old Winamp 2.5 -- to get away from microsoft 
> bloatware).  But on my laptop, running Debian Sarge on Linux 2.6.8, XMMS 
> 1.2.10 and the alsa output plugin 1.2.10, I get skips.  It could be that 
> the wireless card is wimpy but I don't think that could explain the 
> frequency of the occurence (on the order of every 20 seconds).  I have 
> the output plugin, libALSA.so, configured to buffer 5 sec (5000 ms) of 
> data and it seems like that should be quite sufficient.
> 
> There is an XMMS option to allow the program to run with 'realtime' 
> priority, which requires setuid root and is "not recommended." So I am 
> loath to try it.
> 
> Does anyone else have this problem or can anyone suggest solutions?  As 
> far as I know, xmms is the "gold standard" of OSS audio players so I 
> wouldn't expect to have this problem.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Brandon

You wouldn't be playing them over NFS, by chance, would you??  I tried
this once with my wireless laptop.  I connected it to my main machine
via a NFS share.  I was getting some packet loss due to higher noise
levels and since I believe NFS is UDP-based, I was losing packets, which
caused skipping.

My suggestion; try the obvious things (like local testing), but if that
turns out ok, try playing them over your connection while close to the
AP.  Then try something TCP-based for transmission if that fails.  

This is my recollection of a one-time experiment.  YMMV :)

-- 
Carl Benedict
Pittsburgh Techs
Main:  724-741-0233
http://www.pittsburghtechs.com
cbenedic at pittsburghtechs.com