[Live-devel] Tracking down latency

[Jan Ekholm]

On 9 apr 2014, at 18:35, Chris Richardson (WTI) <chris at gotowti.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
>> VLC here is an unknown beast, as it's really hard to know what it's doing
>> and how much it actually buffers and adds to the latency that way.
> 
> By default, VLC is using a buffer of 1 second, so it could be that most of
> your latency comes from there.  To change this, open the Preferences dialog,
> select All under the Show Settings group at the bottom left, then select
> Input/Codecs from the tree view on the left.  Then on the right hand side,
> scroll way down near the bottom and edit the field "Network Caching (ms)".
> You can experiment with lower settings; eventually VLC will stop playing any
> frames altogether because its buffer will be too small.

Argh, so that's the setting to tweak. I didn't find that one and "tweaked" some
other buffer settings that likely then did nothing. Yes, the value is 1000 ms by
default and lowering it makes things better. Going down to 200 ms causes
the playback to not really work at all and with 400 ms there are a lot of 
"picture is too late to be displayed" errors. With 500 ms caching it seems to
work without any errors. That's really too much delay for my use case though,
but good to know where it comes from.

Thank you for pointing it out to me!

-- 
Jan Ekholm
jan.ekholm at d-pointer.com