Newbie Networking Question

Community Archives WD TV Live Networking
1

Hi,

I’ve never done media streaming before.

My (10Mbps) internet connection is always busy (my family members do a lot of downloading, uploading, and Youtubing). Would this affect video streaming of large 1080p Blu-ray content (I’m planning to connect my WD TV Live through ethernet cable to my router + NAS hard drive) and vice versa?

Or is internet bandwidth irrelevant to media streaming?

Thanks in advance.

2

Your internet bandwidth doesn’t matter. I’ve been streaming DVDs and AVIs for a long time. I have a 10/100 home network.

I haven’t had much luck streaming Blu-Ray over the network. In theory it should work. The typical bitrate for a Blu-ray movie is somewhere around 40 Mb. With a 100 Mb ethernet connection is should work, but it doesn’t. I have my Blu-ray movies directly connected via USB to my player. The other stuff works over the network just fine.

I even went to the trouble to upgrade my network and server to gigabit, and the TVix player I use has a gigabit connetion also. It did work better but not satisfactory. It stuttered and dropped out occasionally.

The bitrate for a typical DVD is around 8-10Mb. I have been able to play 4 simultaenous streams from my server without any problems.

Hope this helps.

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3

Thanks a lot for the info, midiman1! :smiley:

My dilemma right now is to whether buy a 4GB HDD, transfer all my movies (mostly 10~20Mbps bit rate / 10~20GB file size Blu-ray encodes) in it, and just connect it through USB 2.0 to my WD Live TV…

Or, replace my WD TV Live with a Popcorn Hour A-200 (which has a gigabit port) and connect it to my gigabit router + WD World Edition II NAS…

Or, just get a Dual N adapter and Dual N router and stream over the 5GHz frequency signal…

Again, most of my movies are 10~20Mbps bit rate / 10~20GB file size Blu-ray encodes.

Which set up do you think is better for glitch-free movie experience?

4

With your internet speed there is no chance your streaming to the Live or their downloading will cause problems.

Your internet is 10Mbps + 50Mbps max for video playback = 60Mbps

The only time you might have issues is if you are transferring files from one pc to the other, that can max out traffic on the network .

I have streamed a video encoded at 1080P that was 9GB for 45 minutes of video and it played fine over the network so I know it works.

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