Dana Thu, 19 Aug 2021 17:32:10 +0100, NY <
me@privacy.invalid> napis'o:
I use my Pi as a PVR. I have use Samba (SMB) to share the drive to which the recordings are being written. I've noticed that when Windows accesses this shared drive while a recording is being made and the file is growing in
size, the file appears to grow in "chunks" - the size and the apparent
length (time) of the recording only changes every few minutes - sometimes an update can be triggered by F5 (refresh Windows Explorer). It's not that the PVR program is only updating a header infrequently, because VLC on the Pi,
It will not update header at all.
THe problem is that the "index" of the video is written at the end
of the file. If you don't have the end... you can only watch while
it is written.
accessing the file via the UNIX filesystem, can see beyond the point at
which VLC on Windows thonks the file ends. It looks as if it's a Samba
issue, as if Samba is buffering the contents. But it's not a restriction of SMB as a whole, because if one Windows PC accesses a file using SMB that is being written to on another Windows computer, the true up-to-the-minute size and contents are available.
Is there a parameter in Samba on Linux which avoids this or shortens the amount of lag? It's not the end of the world if there isn't a way. It just means I need to wait until a recording has finished before I can rely on being able to read the whole of the file.
As you can also copy the file when it is completely written and than
watch it on another machine and also jump through the file.
Usually you cannot jump through the file if it is not written
completely.
As you've written, pressinf F5 for refresh gets the latest size of the
file but you will not be able to skip through the file until recorder
finishes and puts the "index" at the end of the file.
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