[SlimDevices: Beta] Re: going downhill quick

[Andy Grundman]

On Nov 18, 2006, at 2:05 PM, snarlydwarf wrote:

>
> and that is the real trick to deciding the size of buffering streams.
>
> Do you provide the user with a nice realtime response and start  
> playing
> as soon as you have the first couple of frames?  In practice, that  
> ends
> up being awful: a slight network delay will make the stream stop/start
> painfully.
>
> Or do you have a nice fat buffer immune to all but the most severe
> outages?  But who wants to wait 10 minutes to actually hear the  
> station
> they clicked on?
>
> Perhaps a player-setting could be added to allow people to tweak it
> from the default so in cases of network problems they can be more
> patient at the start to avoid cutout problems.  The Squeezebox should
> have plenty of RAM for more buffering than people could possibly want.

And this is exactly what the "Radio Station Buffer Seconds" value is  
for.