My book Live really slow - cant watch films/tv programmes

Hi there

I have recently purchased my book live and i cant seem to watch any videos from it on my laptop as it is so slow to load. Is there anything i can do? I bought it to free up space on my computer but now i think i should have bought a standard hard drive…

Any advice much appreciated

Just a couple questions:

Are you connected with wire or wirelessly?

How large, in gigabytes, are the movies you are trying to watch?

There are a lot more variables with a network hard drive than a standard USB or internal one. Perhaps we can identify which is causing the problem.

Thanks a lot for your response. 

I’m connecting wirelessly and have tried to watch a couple of programmes of around 200MB each

Unless you are running on Wireless B, or are just in a bad wireless spot, you should be able to stream a little 200mb show.

Can you try transfering a file from your computer to the MBL. While it is transfering click the “More Details” in the file transfer pop-up. What is your transfer speed?

Sorry - can you explain what Wireless B is? Running it at home and wifi here normally fine for streaming videos etc

I just tried transferring a file but cant seem to check the speed (I am using a Mac…)

Thanks again for your help

Wireless B is just an old, slow standard. Some places still have it though.

If you have not had a problem streaming on your network in the past, it should not be a problem now.

Can you copy a file, post the size and how long it took to copy. Then I can see what your network speed is… like if a 200mb file takes 1 min then you are at about 56mbps.

I just want to verify that your network is not the bottleneck before troubleshooting further.

Ah ok thanks - that makes sense. An 160MB file took 1 just under a minute (58s) to copy over

That is more than fast enough…

Let me make sure I understand you correctly:

  1. So you have coppied the movies over to your MBL.

  2. You use Finder to locate the MBL and then your movie.

  3. You then try to watch it.

  4. The movie does not play smoothly, or does not load.

Is this correct?

Hi there

Yes thats exactly right. I would also add that in general opening MBL and looking at any files is really slow. I have also transfterred my itunes library over and have to wait a few seconds for it to load each song.

This is a little tough… 

When you copied the file earlier, and posted the time it took, did you copy it to the MBL? I should have specified that earlier.

I did yes… But strangely it all seems to be working now - i can watch films fine. Seems like it was just some sort of quirk. I’ll no doubt be back if it happens again!

Thanks so much for your help

Awesome… cause I was getting stumped!