Mount GD and directplay with VLC stuttering

So I’m currently as a first step trying to play videos directly from my mounted Drive, before I was just copying it to a local folder and then play.
I have the standard pipeline as described in the docs, GD -> Cache -> Crypt and try to mount Crypt to a folder.

My internet connection has 500mbit downstream and downloading from the gd web I reach 480mbit, copying directly from the mounted gd to another local folder I reach about 460mbit.
When I try to play a file directly in VLC player, it buffers a long time, play 2-8sec, buffer again, etc.
One thing I notice is almost no network activity, it takes a good 20-30sec until the first frame is displayed and until then there was no activity higher than 5mbit, then there is a short spike to around 200mbit and then again almost nothing. Those short spikes just occur a few seconds after the video has stopped again.

The last days I tried all the different settings I could find around here on the board and on github, currently running with:
rclone mount --log-level INFO --allow-other --allow-non-empty --cache-chunk-path /mnt/slot3/cache --cache-chunk-no-memory --cache-chunk-size 10M --cache-info-age 72h --cache-db-purge --cache-workers 8 --buffer-size 512M --no-modtime drive_crypt: /mnt/drive

Already updated rclone and now running v1.43, testing on windows and linux.

Is it not possible to play video without plex and the integration? I also tried putting part of my emby lib on GD but that performs even worse.

I’ll see if I can get a debug log posted in the near future.

If you want to use cache, you should turn off buffer-size by setting that to 0M.
I’d keep chunk memory on.
You could also try bumping up from 10M to 32M

and I’d turn it up to DEBUG and you can share that once you start playing it and post it back up.

If none of that works, you can also turn off caching as I don’t use that personally and use vfs-read-chunk-size instead.

I did some more testing today and tried to incorporate the changes you suggested. One debug log is available here: https://paste.ee/p/42uIo (pretty long so let me give you some timestamps)

02:30:17 click on play with vlc
02:30:31 first frame in vlc, no video play yet
02:30:48 first second of video plays, then stuck
02:31:13 another second of video, then stuck again

Also doing a copy gives me more than enough speed to stream that file:
` rclone copy drive_crypt:/Videotest/testvideo.mp4 d: --progress

Transferred:        1.903G / 1.907 GBytes, 100%, 22.288 MBytes/s, ETA 0s
Errors:                 0
Checks:                 0 / 0, -
Transferred:            0 / 1, 0%
Elapsed time:     1m27.4s
Transferring:
*                                 testvideo.mp4: 99% /1.907G, 23.148M/s, 0s`

Mediainfo says Bit rate : 12.0 Mb/s Maximum bit rate : 38.0 Mb/s
for that File.

Using the “stream” feature of rclone browser works perfectly, but that uses rclone cat to vlc
Im really at a loss what to do. Most of the time my connection just idles and it still cant get stuff fast enough.

I have given up on getting it run on windows. Now I have a small debian vm in hyper-v that starts in the background and mounts gdrive via rclone, then shares that folder via smb.
Now playback starts after ~2s and even 4k video plays without stuttering.

Oh, that could be it. I’m not a Windows person as mine runs all on Linux. Happy it working for you!

I think the VM fixes the problem I saw in the logs of the files opening and closing repeatedly when you played it. I’m guessing that is a Windows thing, but dunno for sure.