Buffering options?

[dooferlad]

The whole video skipping issue seems to revolve around your playback machine not having data from the hard disk of the server on time. I just run SageTV on a single machine, so don't have any experience of network issues, but I still suffer from some video skipping. I have got a nice fast hard disk with an 8Mb buffer on it, formatted with 64k clusters. This has not made any difference and it prevents me from defragmenting it!

One way I have found of improving matters is to use reclock and set the audio read ahead to maximum, forcing the OS to read the file ahead of when it is requested by SageTV and buffering the input a bit. This has largely solved the problem, but not completely.

I have 512Mb of RAM in my TV box and I would happily give 128Mb+ over to SageTV just to buffer data on disk read/writes to improve performance. I am sure something like this must be happening all ready, but I have not found a way of setting the buffers to a custom size. Personally I would like to tell SageTV that it can use up to 256Mb of RAM and let it manage the rest. It is not trivial, but not a major task to set up some smart buffering, such that:

1) If a write buffer is more than 70% occupied it is increased in size (heck, doubled is fine by me).
2) If a read buffer hits less than 30% occuped it is increased in size.