Confused by observation

[Gman496]

I tried something on my home network the other day and the results have left me slightly confused.

I'm a self confessed hoarder of TV media (Show series and documentary's) and use my sons Xboxes to stream the media to TV's around the house.

My setup is straight forward, my son has two X boxes, one in his bedroom and the other in our living room. All our media is stored on HDD's installed in and connected to my main computer. The media on my PC is shared via the networked Xboxes and displayed on TV's.

The fact that I am making the media available to more than one device made me think "What if a media file I wish to use on one device is already in use on another device?" You know. like the way you have ever tried to delete a text file that was open and you get the message "Unable to delete because the file is in use?" or if you had a Word Document open and you try to open it a second time it tells you it's already in use and you can open it in read only mode?

Anyway, here's what I tried, I went to my sons Xbox in his bedroom and played the file "Criminal Minds S01E01" when it was about 10mins in I went to the second Xbox in the living room and tried to play the same file, it played right from the start. After Approx 5mins I went to my own PC and attempted to play that same file on a third device (my PC) and it started to play from the beginning. I now had the single source media file playing on three different devices at the same time and on each device the show was at a different point in the show. All three were playing fine without any jitter or noticeable problems.

I'm not complaining one bit, I think it's a great setup lol

How can that be? How does it do that? Why was I not greeted with the "The file is in use" error? :whacko:

 

[jodav]

The way I see it, files does not play\open directly from your hard drive per say, all files are copied into your RAM which is much much faster but temporary. So each device you play the movie on would each COPY the file needed into their respective RAM and for want of a better word do what they want with it. With a document that is editable like a word doc, then once it is put into RAM you will need an option to save your changes, I suppose that if it would be open in a few different areas of RAM it would not know which one to save if they all gave you that option.

 

[ferguj1]

Here is my theory for what it is worth. lol As you know your disk head is able to read from a gazzilion (yeah I made that up) points on the platters at any given time giving you the ability to multiple read and writes at any given moment. Being as you were not trying to alter a file that was already in use, but simply read from it, you were presented with no issue.

 

[axxxo]

Id agree with what the chaps said, just like its buffed and if you switch the pc off it will continue to play on the xbox for a couple of minutes before it cuts out.
Technology today lol
By the way Gman i think i noticed you mentioning something about TVersity before for the xbox, i gave it ago and its Fantabulous!!! (i made that up too :) )

Added after 5 minutes:

p.s. sounds like you were bored Gman lol

 

[Gman496]

I just loooooooove technology when it works in your favour lol

@axxxo, I just stream through media player 11 & 12 but TVersity is good too if you want the bells and whistles

 

[axxxo]

Yeah i normally do the same but that tversity just picks up everything straightaway and presents them to you in one display,havent had issues with with the media player since i switched to windows 7. mind you i switched the dam xbox on this morning and got the nasty E65 error, im putting it down to doing a spring clean on the cables at the back of the tv, pulled out two scarts, hd cable, ethernet and power cord that werent being used, unreal i am :) hopefully its just the xbox getting settled in its new home and i just disturbed it with the move!