Explain this to me like I'm a four-year old...

[sainswor99]

K, I'll admit I'm no expert when it comes to media files, so please be gentle I'm struggling to understand my performance issues with Placeshifter on my LAN.

I'm currently running Placeshifter on an older laptop (Portege; Pentium M 1000; 1 Gig RAM). I have a 802.11n network. I've been having issues with playback in Sage across the network.

I've manually transcoded; I've turned off B-frames. Lots of things work for a little while, and then suddenly I have issues again.

Today, I got so frustrated with Sage, I decided to play back a TV show in Windows Media Player instead of Sage. The file wouldn't open, claiming that I needed an appropriate MPEG-2 codec to play back the file. I installed ffdshow, opened the file, and playback was super smooth. I decided to try Sage again, and suddenly I have no issues.

Why? As long as it works, I suppose the answer doesn't matter. I just want to know for my own edification.

Stu

[bakechad]

Stu,

Wireless networks are a love/hate relationship. There great when they work properly, but no matter how strong a signal shows there will be always have some issues.

Currently I am running MythTV (soon will be switching to Sage), and when I run it across to my 802.11g based laptop it works fine most of the time, but I will get intermittent jumps, stalls, etc. here and there. Don't take signal strength as an indicatior of how well the network is performing. You need use monitoring tools, or file transfer comparisons to determine your true performance. You will be shocked at the variability of your connection.

With that said, wireless will never work as well as wired. So if there is anyway to run a wire, do it and plan for gigabit moving forward.

I probably haven't helped much. I think wireless is great for using a browser on my couch, but for high bandwith media I won't even mess with wireless anymore.

Good luck, I hope you can solve the problem.

Chad

[sainswor99]

Hey Chad,

Thanks for the response; since this post has lain stagnant for a while, I've done some more investigation since I wrote it. In part, you are correct: the stability and speed of the network do affect the playback, however, in my case, it was definitely related to the codec. I've not had any playback issues since upgrading the codec on the laptop, and I've made no other effective changes before or after that change.

See http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25161 for a fuller explanation.

Stu