Hi All,

I'm setting up a VoD solution at home, to stream movies recorded from digita
l TV to various PC's around the house. 

I have setup Apache webserver v2.0.52 on a Win XP Home machine. I use VLC 8.
1 on the client PC's. 

A movie (mpeg2) can be anywhere from 2gB to 7gB in size and are recorded on 
to SATA 7200RPM Hard drives NTFS partitions. 

On the client I enter http://movieserver:80//Movies/Movie.tp 

I can succesfully stream 3 movies at the same time. The problem I am having 
is, irrespective of the size of the movie, If I try to stream more than 3 at
 the same time, some of the streams stop playing. 

I have tried re-configuring the Apache httpd file but nothing I do affects t
he problem. I upgraded the network so all machines have 1gB network cards (C
at5e cabling) installed and are connected via a gigabit switch. The network 
utilization with 3 streams averages at 2% so I don't believe network bandwid
th is an issue. 

I can use VLC on the server to stream 8 concurrent movies using UDP to each 
individual client PC before I hit a disk bottleneck which can cause the movi
es to jutter. (CPU is a 3.2GhZPentium4 with 1mB cache, Ram 512kB) I tried in
creasing the server memory to 1gB but that also made no difference. CPU Util
 with 3 http streams 14%. 

I read some documentation regarding Apache, suggesting that the following pa
rameters were set in the httpd.conf file; 
EnableMMap off 
EnableSendfile off 
Win32DisableAcceptex 

With enablesend file off, the movies are cut short. In the VLC debug, the st
reamsize is reported incorrectly and an eof is received terminating the movi
e. 

Has anybody else come across this 3 stream limit with Apache, and if so is t
here a solution other than chucking out XP and going with Linux? 

Regards
A Newbie

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