Stream HD Movies with badass speeds = Stuttering

So my setup is:

TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 on my Desktop computer which streams the movies

TP-Link TL-WN821N v2on the WD TV Live

TP-Link TD-W8961ND is the Wifi Router

= all devices support 300Mpbs 802.11n

My desktop dongle has 80% signal quality with 300Mbps speed and the WD TV Live shows 4 bars for Signal Quality.

So why on earth isn’t that enough for streaming HD content at 10541Kbps?

hi

let me say this way - via wifi you would never reach the quality/speed that might be provided by ethernet link

pls - check the same file while having cable rj45 linked router to WD 

you would see - works pefect then.

seems the “wifi” does not fully cooperate - may I say so [real transfer both ways 300 is a pure theory , and a  usb 2.0 seems the bottle neck while transfer in our case , I mean no 3.0 port as yet]

the solutuion : use  “linked/wired”  huge materials only  

regards

pawson 

I am well aware that Ethernet is much better than any Wifi and I’m also aware that 300Mbps is a non usable speed as there are overheads included, but it is ridiculous that an HD movie with a streaming bandwidth of less than 15Mbps cannot be played over Wireless N connection. Also I don’t see why you are mentioning USB 2.0 as a bottleneck when it’s real speed is easily in excess of 150Mbps.

So who is to blame? The wifi network or the WD device?

Well, it could be both.

My rip of Apollo 13 is 30.8 Gigabytes.   It is a 2-hour, 19 minute movie, so on average, the bit rate is approximately 29.4 megabits per second.

My rip of Iron Man 2 is 33.5 Gigabytes.   It is a 2-hour, 5-minute movie, so on average, the bit rate is approximately 36 megabits per second.   It streams fine to my WDTV via WiFi.

My Apollo 13 has no problems playing via WiFi.

My Iron Man 2 will begin to stutter every few minutes.

So, for me, the magic number is somewhere between 30 and 36 megabits per second.

Very interesting observation, but I think the answer lies somewhere else.

Hopefully someone will come and give us the solution.

Because I can connect the WD TV Live with an ethernet cable to my router, but then how would I know if the Wifi connection of my PC to the router won’t cause any problems?

You won’t.

The WiFi environment is so riddled with conditions that are, for the most part, beyond your control.

Your conditions might be hampered by any combination of Non WiFi Interference sources, Channel overlap, channel congestion, External WiFI interference from nearby neighbors, etc. etc.

I’m a network engineer by trade, and I spend a good deal of my time with wireless in an enterprise environment.   Even in a locked-in space, it’s almost impossible to control.

So I did the test - I connected the WD TV Live with a 20m ethernet cable to my router and the same movie that was stuttering over Wifi was now playing without any issues whatsover - I played the whole movie.

The conslusion to me is that the problem lies with the WD TV Live - it somehow cannot handle Wifi properly.

 No WIFI reaches anything close to 300mb. USB 2 is only 10mb. Reason why some high bit rate moves stutter. These interfaces are at bandwidth limitations. Has nothing to do with overhead at this point. Also WIFI systems transmit your data in free air. Meaning a neighbor kid or hacker could get into your router and use your internet and steal files. Not to mention upload a virus and crash your system. Why place yourself as a posslible victim?

 USB 2 is no where near 150mbps. Plus USB 2 runs in half duplex. Ethernet has full duplex capability. See the difference now? 

 You need a WIRED connection. Use the wired Ethernet jack and see what you get.

 Can’t blame the WD unit because you connected to low BW interfaces.

slomo

 Throw the WIFI in the trash where it belongs. It’s another gimic for lazy people. Use the WIRED full duplex capable Ethernet jack.

 Bandwidth limitations are not the fault of the WD TV unit. Has nothing to do with “handling WIFI properly”.

slomo

slomo wrote:

 No WIFI reaches anything close to 300mb. USB 2 is only 10mb.

 

 

slomo

Err, no.   USB2.0 is 480 mbit per second maximum, not 10.  :)

 That’s what the white paper says. Try any USB 2 device and benchmark it. Like an external USB 2.0 HDD for example. Open HD Tach or similar application and tell me what you get. Post a screen shot of YOUR test here. This obviously means pictures please.

 So what you are saying is USB 2 is 4.8 times faster than a 100mb Ethernet link? DON’T THINK SO…

 USB 3.0 is finally full duplex. Using the SuperSpeed USB 3 link along with the USB 2 link.

 Here’s more below.

http://www.everythingusb.com/speed.html#3

Isn’t USB 2.0 fast enough?
Well, yes and no. USB 2.0 for many applications provides sufficient bandwidth for a variety of devices and hubs to be connected to one host computer. However, with today’s ever increasing demands placed on data transfers with high-definition video content, terrabyte storage devices, high megapixel count digital cameras, and HD video capture and portable media players, 480Mbps is not really fast anymore.

Furthermore, no USB 2.0 connection could ever come close to the 480Mbps theoretical maximum throughput, making data transfer at around 320Mbps (40MB/s) - the actual real-world maximum. Similarly, USB 3.0 connections will never achieve 4.8Gbps. We will likely see a real-world maximum rate of 400MB/s with overheads. At this speed, USB 3.0 is a 10x improvement over USB 2.0.

 

slomo 

I’m not arguing that point. 

I’m only saying that your statement:  “USB 2 is only 10mb.” is just flat wrong.

Even the reference you cite below says 320, not 10…

Here’s a benchmark to a vanilla portable USB-powered hard disk on a USB2.0 port…

35 Megabytes per second is 280 megabits per second, which is 28 times faster than your claim, and is 2.8x faster than the ethernet interface.   280 megabits per second is sufficient to, theoretically, stream 4 or more BD’s simultaneously off the USB port… 

 TonyPh12345,

 I stand corrected on your USB speed test. The devices I tested were the slow ipod nano, seems to run at usb 1 and an old parallel 30gb laptop HD connected with a usb interface. Must of been the controller capped at 10MB.

 The attached picture is a shot of the same old laptop drive on another usb interface cable/controller setup. HD Tach shows an average read of 18.1MB. Yup that is bytes. Clearly over the 10MB remark I made. Again I stand corrected.

 Anyway as we know the usb interace is not full duplex. And I know if you try to copy multiple files to an external USB drive, then the copy speed slows down terribly. Actually now that I think about it, WONDOZE reported that 10MB. My bad again Tony.

 Speed is speed but running multiple tasks taxes the usb interface. Many people report and I’ve seen personally, streaming videos can stutter across usb. Especially on a usb 1 device. It’s a one way path or half duplex. Which Ethernet smokes all day everyday.

slomo

Can’t paste from Word like it says. Over 20k characters error.

 Anyway I tried to show the 18.1MB test I got. That’s 144 mbit speed on that old drive.

slomo

Running multiple parallel writes taxes ANY hard disk drive controller, USB or otherwise.

high-performance drives often have controllers that do much better command pipelining, caching, and “Elevator Queuing” to prevent head thrashing.

I can prove that out by writing 10 parallel 100KB files via USB3.0.   The Host to CONTROLLER speed is PHENOMENAL over USB.    But once it starts comitting to disk with larger files, it slows down dramaticly.

So, even an ETHERNET connected NAS is not going to perform much better just because it’s ETHERNET.

It’s all up to the drive controller, not the interface.

TonyPh12345,

 I agree. Really shows their cards on USB though. In your last situation any interface would suffer.

 My point is Ethernet trumps usb 1 and 2 at the physical performance level. If you want to compare “speeds” here just run gigabit Ethernet or 10gb Ethernet. USB 3 finally joins the party with Firewire and Ethernet. Compare any WIFI to Ethernet or any other direct connection to WIFI and you will see higher performance. How many posts are on just this forum about guys having issues with WIFI?

slomo

Back to the topic at hand…

I do believe there is something very wrong with the network stack for the WD TV Live / Plus, particularly with USB wifi adapters.

My network is bottlenecked by a cheap MoCA device but even so, NetStress running on my server and a laptop sitting at the same location as the WD TV Live and using the same USB adapter ( ASUS N13 ) gives ~50mbps throughput yet a 5.8 Kbps movie starts skipping <30 secs into it.

That’s even accounting for the on-going issue I have with my WD TV Live Plus unit where the share to the USB drive on the unit continously drops offline.

At the end I decided to run ethernet cables, because clearly there is something wrong with the wireless network and this time I’m going to blame my **bleep** router. Never buy TP Link.