Dear geeks....

Why is this shit not easy yet? Are we not living in the future?

I have a linux box, with a large hard drive and some stored video files (avi and mpeg). I have a Mac OSX box, with VLC. I have the videos on a shared drive, mounted on the OSX box via samba. I also have a web server on the linux box, with access to the video files.

If I play them via samba, vlc stutters and apparently fails to buffer. If I play them via http, VLC plays them fine, but loses the ability to seek within the video, and if I pause for too long, apparently loses the file altogether and crashes.

W, seriously, TF? How hard is it in this day and age to say "Here is a file. Yes, it's on the other end of a wireless link, but don't let that freak you out".

I'm about to look into having a streaming VLC server on the linux box, but seriously, thats' a stupid amount of effort to go to just to play a video. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? Any magic VLC switch that says "Treat this as a 'local' file, but give me a bit of buffering"?

ETA: GIYF! Apparently, hidden away in the preferences, is an option for increasing the buffer on "local" files - the Mac/Samba is apparently a common issue, and tweaking that has fixed it. Huzzah!