Increase buffering?

[coppit]

Hi everyone,

I have a SageTV Server running with a network drive that contains all my movies. The network drive is in a machine that's on the other side of a wireless 802.11b link. Due to a number of reasons I can't put my movies machine on a wired network along with my SageTV server.

Here's the deal: I can play single def content just fine over wireless. I can also play 720p content just fine if I copy it to the SageTV server first. But if I play 720p movies that are located on the networked drive over wireless, the picture gets choppy and eventually blacks out. I can still hear the audio though.

This sounds like a buffering problem to me.

Now, I can copy a 2 hour movie from the server to the local drive in less than an hour, so in terms of raw bitrate I have about twice as much as I need on average. How can I get SageTV to do more buffering of the file it's reading from the network drive?

Is there a CIFS setting I need to tweak? The movie server is an UNRAID machine running CIFS (not Samba).

[gplasky]

But I can copy a 2 hour (4 GB) movie on a wired network in less than 5 minutes. Your wireless thru put will always be an issue trying to play HD over the network. Unless you use 802.11 n and do not have a lot of distance, thick walls or interference. Just search the forums and see how many people have either gone to 802.11n or gave up wireless and found a way to go wired.

Gerry

[toony]

If you are not able to run cat 5 or cat 6e cables why not try one of those network over the power lines systems. I don't know much about it and have heard mixed reviews but certainly it's got to be better than wireless.

My gigabit network can transfer 18gigs in 5 - 8 min, wireless would take hours.

The technology just isn't there yet, at least not for what you want it to do, off the shelf stuff anyways.

[TallMomof2]

Or try ethernet over coax. I'm using a NIM 100 to network my HDHR and I'm impressed with the throughput. Next up is to hook up my HD200 with a NIM 100 and see how that works.

Ethernet over powerline is okay but I found that the throughput is much lower than ethernet over coax. I'm using a pair for of ethernet over powerline for the family PC and it's fine for that but streaming 720p sometimes chokes out the connection and 1080i doesn't work at all. SD works great far better than the old wireless g.

Of course you might have different results. I found that the powerline equipment was highly dependent on location because the more times you have to go through a circuit breaker the higher the signal loss. I'm in a 17yo house so the wiring is still okay. There are a lot more problems if you're in an apartment/condo with powerline.