Thank God! I thought I was the only one having this problem.
I also have a Ubuntu box with all my movies and I stream videos wirelessly from it to my macbook using XBMC (ubuntu) and Plex (mac). At first I thought the problem was the wireless G speeds from my previous router so I bought an Airport Extreme Base Station and connected it via ethernet to my existing ADSL/Wireless router on a bridge configuration. Both ubuntu and macbook are now connected at 300Mbps but I'm still experiencing occasional choppy video. The wireless connection stays up at all times so it's not a wireless connectivity issue.
I tried NFS but the problem persisted. I also installed Windows 7 RC on my bootcamp partition and had the exact same problem. Which means it can be an issue with the Airport on the macbook. I don't have another computer with Windows so I cannot say if it would work better on a PC.
At first I suspected the problem was with ubuntu so I posted this on the ubuntu forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7324538
As you can see on the description I was getting those messages on the mac logs:
26/05/09 6:02:19 PM KernelEventAgent[198] tid 00000000 type 'smbfs', mounted on '/Volumes/MediaCenter', from '//ed@ed-linux/MediaCenter', not responding
26/05/09 6:02:19 PM KernelEventAgent[198] tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)
26/05/09 6:02:19 PM loginwindow[197] 1 server now unresponsive
At first I thought it was a problem with the arp tables on the mac. I created a static entry for my ubuntu box. Now the connection is better and the samba volume doesn't disconnect as often and when it does, it reconnects after a while. Before the arp table static entry I had to reconnect manually:
26/05/09 6:02:32 PM kernel smb
iodreconnect: Reconnected to ed-linux
One other thing to add. Before installing 10.5.7 (i.e running 10.5.6), I had this problem and the video used to get frozen (samba share disconnection) once or twice on a 1 hour video and reconnected 15 to 20 seconds right after it. Not a big deal. Now it happens several times (5 or 6 times on a 30 minute video) and it takes around 30 to 40 seconds to reconnect.
Message was edited by: edvar