Maybe this isn’t an exclusively an Infuse related issue, but I’ve chosen not to use SMB because the speeds in testing with Infuse’s connection test show it’s significantly slower than with WebDAV to my NAS (80 megabit/s versus 350 on Wi-Fi; 400 megabit/s versus 850 via Ethernet) — this is for iOS devices. I’ve tried using another similar video player with file transfer download and see the same issues with speeds on the same iOS devices (iPad pro, iPhone 13, Apple TV 4K). The issue is still present on MacOS but has speed improvements of maybe 20% from those above. When testing on a windows machine, I don’t see this same issue and speed inequities across WebDAV vs SMB (and also SSH, etc ) — they are much closer.
Just wondering if others notice this issue on iOS devices when connecting on methods outside of WebDAV. I’m using a synology DS716ii and have tried all the various SMB version options suggested in tons of other threads. It doesn’t make sense to me why using WebDAV which is an overlay of HTTP/S would be so much faster on iOS — but then again, I’m not a networking expert and know that there are quirks with the apple ecosystem and file sharing protocols.
Also tested with SFTP and FTP — with FTP I get near identical speeds to WebDAV (https) — around 350-400 megabit/s on Wi-Fi … SFTP however is on par with SMB at around 60-100. I’m not keen on testing with NFS, as I don’t want all users (even in LAN) to not have to authenticate / I don’t trust the security on NFS merely based on IP address.
So my testing is pretty much that WebDAV and FTP win out (maxing out gigabit and Wi-Fi), whereas SMB and SFTP cuts the speed by 2x-4x. There’s a major hit to performance on SMB going from my synology unit to an iOS device to the point where there’s noticeable buffer lag on Wi-Fi trying to locally stream high bitrate 4K videos — this disappears with WebDAV and a 4 gig file is fully buffered in a couple minutes. I don’t see these speed issues on windows machines accessing my synology NAS on SMB — the speeds similarly max out gigabit and are on par with WebDAV using iOS devices.
Hopefully this is useful to those of you trying to play back very large video files on iOS devices from a Linux based NAS and trying to dial in the optimal protocol for speed on Infuse. The transfer protocol to choose is not at all trivial and has significant real world speed differences.
Infuse using SMB has historically been slow in comparison to WebDav. Synology just released an updated SMB version in beta. I haven’t tried a speed test with the new version of SMB on my Synology NAS but am interested to see if there is any performance improvement.
Personally, I use WebDav for local streaming in my home and for remote streaming. It works great, so I haven’t seen a need to desire SMB.
Agreed. Although sometimes it can make things feel a little more snappy when you have that extra fast network connection. It would be nice to know why SMB via Infuse isn’t capable of achieving full gigabit throughout. The ATV and Synology NAS support 1gbps obviously, so what is the reason for SMB maxing out at 300-400mbps?
SMB includes more overhead than other protocols, and the max speed can vary greatly on the device and network environment.
The upcoming 7.4.10 release also includes a number of SMB related improvements, which can be especially helpful when using Wi-Fi.
Anecdotally, I’m able to get 500+ Mbps when streaming on a 2022 ATV4K from Synology NAS over a wired connection. Others have reported even higher speeds in the past.
