Very choppy playback on all files bigger then 4gb

Every video under 4gb works perfectly anything over is very choppy and unwatchable.  I have the wdtv live networked to my router about 10 feet away.  Could it be my wireless adapter?  I have the Buffalo Compact one.  Or maybe my router which I got from verizon  which is a G.  It works fine when hard wired.  Did I do something wrong in the set up? Or if anybody thinks it is something else please let me know.  Please advise

Thanks!!!

I just spoke with level 2 support and their answer is to use a wired connection. 

I wouldn’t rely on that info from tech support – I routinely play much larger files (up to 20GB) flawlessly from my wireless setup.

Obviously net traffic is an issue – make sure you’re not running any file sharing software, or other polling stuff.  But containers make a difference as well – the MKV container plays particularly smooth, and is what I use for all my stuff.

Thanks for the reply.  I might  have some file sharing software going.  I will check when I get home.  Could that be the cause of the problem?  You can never be sharing files when you operate the WDTV live on the home network??

Does it matter that my router is a type g? 

I would say that its not the size of the videos which make the difference but the size and the length. Obviously if the video has a large size and a short length it means that it probably has a higher bitrate and your g router WI-FI is going to  work hard to keep up. However if has the same size but a much longer length then it probably has a lower bitrate and everything is fine. Streaming high quality video takes most if not all of the WI-FI bandwidth and obviously something has to give if you use the WI-FI for other things at the same time as watching a video etc.

Regarding connecting to the WDTV, in order of preference it would be:

  1. Directly wired

  2. Wireless N

  3. Wireless G

Yes.  And my network is G, and still works great streaming high bitrates files IF I don’t try and do anything with a lot of other traffic (and sharing files is a definite no-no, as it will eat up tons of your bandwidth, so make sure you aren’t doing that when trying to play videos).

My wife and I can both surf the net with no issues on video playback, but if I try and transfer a file to TiVO it will stop playback dead in the water (and I doubt whether even a directly wired network would help there).

Wired Networks would use a router with a built-in switch, or wired through a switch.

A switch moves traffic only between the source and destinations without re-broadcasting it to all others machines wired up. This is in contrast to an older hub, which rebroadcasts every packet to every port. Hubs went out with 10BaseT; 100MB Ethernet and faster rarely uses anything other than switches.

On a wireless network, like on a ‘hubbed’ network, only one machine can broadcast at a time, and everybody has to wait for their “turn” to talk. On a wired and switched network multiple concurrent conversations can happily exist as long as they are all talking to different machines (ie different sources and destinations).

So, no, you would not get these problems on a wired network when moving files between computer A and computer C whilst playing content on your WD  from computer B.