So I just picked up a new laptop, the Dell Studio 15″ which looks and performs great but as I’m in a brick walled apartment I had issues with streaming video over a wireless connection from my Linux file server. The symptoms were stuttering, hitching and skipping but with VLC I was able to fix this issue!

Firstly open up VLC and the click on Settings > Preferences.

Now follow these steps in the Preferences dialog box:

  1. Expand the Input / Codecs option
  2. Expand the Access Modules option
  3. Click on the File option
  4. Check the Advanced Options check box in the bottom right hand corner

Your Preferences dialog box should look now look like this:

You will see that the Caching value in ms is set to 300 ms. That means that VLC only caches (pre-loads) 300ms or 0.3 seconds of video playback which is not a lot of time especially if you are trying to stream movie length DivX rips. Change this value to a more reasonable amount, I set mine to 3000 ms (3 seconds) and click on the Save button.

Now try and play your video, you should have seamless play without any hitches, if you still do try increasing the Caching value in ms value, the only cons of increasing this value are seeing increases in loads times when:

  • Loading the file
  • Playing from a Pause state
  • Skipping and searching through the video

Another way around this problem is to just use an Ethernet cable :)

Enjoy!