How much wireless bandwidth is enough?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

My WDTV is quite new, my wireless router is a little old (54mb G airstation)

Viewing video content from my PC share gets choppy quite often and so I’ve been looking into the bandwidth usage to see if my wireless is up to the task or it’s just a settings issue.

Watching non HD content  but the choppiness occures more with ripped DVDs than with other formats. When I look at task manager on windows I see the usage hit about 25-30% of the 100mb nic when it seems to have problems.

Video needing less than this seems to run fine and my wireless seems unable to run better than this regardless of settings…

For a CD though, should I really need 25-30mb/s of bandwidth to watch though, Is there some massive overhead that I’m not aware of? I thought that DVDs couldn’t deliver higher than 9mb/s or so…

Is this just a wireless bandwidth issue?

2

Get a 720 or 1080 video and put it on a USB stick, plug it into your WD TV Live and then try and play the video over wireless on your WD TV Live.

Is it only your WD TV Live unit that is connected to your wireless network, or is it also your PC that is wireless?

If both are connected wireless, it would be best to test with one of the plugged directly into your router, not both being wireless.

3

If you want to wirelessly stream media, you need a faster router than 54/g.  Time to upgrade to a wireless N, dual-band  router; the higher 5G of the dual bands is faster than 2.4G band and best suited for streaming media.  Look into the Asus RT-N66U or similar ones from WD and others.

Even with better equipment, streaming could be problematic if your devices are too far from router and have a weak signal.  You need “excellent” signal strength between all units.

If at all possible, connect all devices “wired”.

4

N-5 ghz would be great, but this box doesn’t support it.

I have a Asus RT-N66U and it works great using 2.4.  I have zero issues streaming large MKVs (i.e. 20GB) over wifi. 

5

OK, fine., so the WD player doesn’r use 5G – better believe the next new model will.   I use 5G all the time to stream stuff, and not just from the WD player/drives.  When I do stream from the WD player I am connect edto my ROUTER from the iPad at 5G.  Since my WD player is connected via wired, I then have a 5G wireless connection for all intents and purposes. I also have devices that are 5G capable.  If one buys a new router, they darn well ought to get a dual band model in today’s world.

6

I use a buffalo router G 54mbps high power, and it is enough to stream everything, including 1080p movies from my wb mybook live.

7

I also had a G-band router in the recent past and it worked fine for streaming from WD; but it was streaming both ways via WIRED, not wireless.  A wired connection on a G-band is 100 mbps; not 54 mbps.  I now have a gigabit router (when wired) and dual-band when wireless.  The G-band wireless was not as robust as the wired, of course, and when I tried wireless with it, there were some files that stuttered, but not all.