#614 Media stream crashes
Hi all,
Im running an Ubuntu Server 16.04 with only Netatalk.
When copying files it goes up to 120MB/s, but if i want to play mkv/mp4 video's directly every media player crashes. When copying the file to my local machine it works very good. Before, when i was running Ubuntu Server 13.04 it was running perfect. But now it crashes all the time... what do we do now?
sudo apt-get install netatalk
afpd.conf
-transall -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx2.so -mimicmodel RackMac
AppleVolumes.default:
~/Share1 "Share1" allow:richard cnidscheme:cdb
/etc/default/netatalk
ATALK_UNIX_CHARSET='LOCALE'
ATALK_MAC_CHARSET='MAC_ROMAN'
export ATALK_UNIX_CHARSET
export ATALK_MAC_CHARSET
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no
afpd 2.2.5 - Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) daemon of Netatalk
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version. Please see the file COPYING for further information and details.
afpd has been compiled with support for these features:
AFP versions: 1.1 2.0 2.1 2.2 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3
DDP(AppleTalk) Support: Yes
CNID backends: dbd last tdb
afpd.conf: /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf
AppleVolumes.system: /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.system
AppleVolumes.default: /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default
afp_signature.conf: /etc/netatalk/afp_signature.conf
afp_voluuid.conf: /etc/netatalk/afp_voluuid.conf
afp_ldap.conf: /etc/netatalk/afp_ldap.conf
UAM search path: /usr/lib/netatalk/
Server messages path: /etc/netatalk/msg/
lockfile: /var/run/afpd.pid
I want to ask: When playing an mp4 file from an afp/netatalk share, does it stream? Do i need libraries on the server? Or why doesn't it play it continuesly? How can i debug this? It plays good after 1 or 2 plays after a couple movies it doesn't work, hangs
I tested this with the latest netatalk development code in the main branch, on a macOS Ventura client, streaming mkv files from an afp shared volume, using the VideoLAN client. This worked alright, although I got pauses for buffering, probably due to latency over wifi. In general I don't think AFP is an ideal protocol to stream video. This is not what it was designed for.
To answer your questions: I do believe that a video would be read by a media player client as a stream over AFP. I do not think you need any special software on the server.
If you're seeing instability after some time, I would look out for memory constraints, perhaps other processes taking up resources, or a memory leak in afpd itself. You can try to monitor memory usage over time.
Anyhow, I suggest you upgrade to netatalk3, which may be better suited for this application.