VLC player takes very long to play files from a smb NAS file server

Question

I noticed that the VLC player takes about 10 to 20 seconds to start playing next mp3 and mp4 files from my smb NAS server (FRITZ!Box). Since these files play almost instantly with other players like the Windows Media Player the problem seems to be in VLC.

How can I get VLC to play as fast as other media players?

Solution

In the VLC forum for example at reduce delay ( caching ? ) of network stream and How to reduce VLC buffering time when video starts?? and at other pages I found some suggestions about reducing the caching of network streams by starting VLC with the options

--udp-caching=500 --tcp-caching=500 --realrtsp-caching=500

I found these options also in the GUI at

Tools->Preferences->All (Advanced Preferences)

by searching for caching.

Reducing the tcp and udp caching values of Stream output from 300 to 1 reduced the delay significantly.

Comments

[Frank Breitling]

Yes, with the latest 3.0.3.

[wangkaibule]

It is important to correctly set the time on the samba server, and also choose the same local time zone on both server and vlc client sides.

[Rainer Rillke]

That didn't help me with 3.0.8 trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21470 - got "ES_OUT_SET_(GROUP_)PCR is called too late" - interestingly Opus (audio codec) encoded files were not affected and the network bandwidth is not even close to be fully used. Looks like VLC is throttling the bandwidth for itself and then runs out of buffered data.