Brite Lite File Gateway
Pixel Brite browses and plays directly from network shares. Brite Lite asks every protocol to do the same two things: list a folder with its metadata, and read any byte range from an open file. That enables fast browsing, direct playback, and seeking without a full-file download.
800–876 Mb/s medianthrough the gateway on a 925–939 Mb/s LAN path
Why network shares felt slow
Round trips were the bottleneck: metadata fetched row by row, whole files copied before playback, and small reads issued serially. That last pattern turns latency into a throughput ceiling. Adding more protocols would only multiply those paths.
List files and metadata together
Scrolling no longer triggers one metadata request per row. SMB, SFTP, and NFS reuse the attributes carried by their directory listings. WebDAV requests the same fields with a depth-one PROPFIND. One directory operation returns everything Pixel Brite needs to display the folder.
Keep one remote file open
Seeking does not reopen or download the file. Playback keeps one logical reader, and every call names a byte offset. SMB, SFTP, and NFS retain native remote file state across those calls. WebDAV keeps its authenticated HTTP session and requires the server to honor each requested range. A seek discards stale read-ahead and continues at the new offset.
Turn small reads into sustained throughput
Small player reads no longer limit the network to one round trip at a time. Sequential calls grow into a bounded transfer window, and the gateway keeps one window ahead. SMB, SFTP, and WebDAV adapt the window to recent delivery speed. NFSv3 and NFSv4 divide it into parallel reads over a bounded set of sessions. A seek resets the window to its small starting size, and a larger movie never creates an unbounded buffer.
800–876 Mb/s through the gateway
The benchmark browses a share, checks noncontiguous ranges, then reads a deterministic 128 MiB file through the gateway in 64 KiB player-facing calls. These are three-run medians on a 925–939 Mb/s raw LAN path; every run also checked the returned bytes.
| Protocol | IPv4 | IPv6 |
|---|---|---|
| SMB | 862.0 | 849.8 |
| SFTP | 800.1 | 841.6 |
| WebDAV | 875.9 | 863.8 |
| NFSv3 | 865.8 | 829.6 |
| NFSv4 | 868.6 | 854.7 |
Small reads at the player can now use most of the available bandwidth. The same interface handles browsing, sequential playback, and arbitrary seeks across all five protocols.