Minimize delay/cache?

[MartinG]

After having used VLC for ages, and also a bit MPC-BE I tried SMPlayer with MPV today - and I can only wish I had done this sooner. It works very good for all my types of usage, and much better than trusty old VLC in many regards!

I only really have one single problem with SMPlayer, and that is that the "delay" is a bit too large when watching live network streams. With "delay" I mean that there are always 6-8 seconds shown as "remaining" and I cannot jump closer to live than that. For example 00:00:08 far right in the screenshot below:



This delay seems to be the same value shown in the log as INFO_LENGTH:

INFO_LENGTH=8.826833

It is mostly 6-8 seconds.

I assume it is related to cache and that the player starts when cache is full? I have tried changing cache settings but cannot make this delay smaller. In VLC I could set the "caching" to a certain number of milliseconds.

So, is there a way to make this "delay" smaller?

My main testing has been with transport streams from a satellite receiver using enigma2.

[rvm]

Maybe you need to use the mpv option --cache-secs to change the delay. More info about all the cache options:
https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#cache

[MartinG]

Thanks. Tried fiddling with that as well, no real change on how long the inital delay is.

But I solved it I think. I changed the "Short jump" to 1 second and with that small jump I could jump closer to real time with a few clicks. I had tried that before, but as "remaining time" still was shown as 6 seconds I didn't think it worked - but it does. So I think remaining time in that case isn't shown exactly correct.

BTW, if I start MPV directly I always get the small 1 second buffer that I want - so SMPlayer is inducing the longer delay somehow. Haven't figured out exactly why, but I'm good for now!