Playing media over LAN

[RodneyB]

Hi there I was wondering if someone could help me out with a problem please

I have Media Portal running on two PCs at home
The main room that has 2TB of storage and works great, but the one I set up in the second room is giving me grief.

Movies that are stored on the local drive work ok but if I try to play anything over the LAN seems to not be able to cache enough to work, it jumps and the sound and pic are out.

Windows Media player does not have a problem since I turned up the cache but I cant find the cache feature on MP

Does MP have a cache feature I can crank up a few clicks ?

[Nightmare77]

sounds like you are running i of a wireless connection? or do you have it connected up via ethernet

[Andrew H]

I'm using MY wired LAN and streaming works fine! Whether an ISO, or a dvr-ms. I'd say it's a wireless issue as well if you're studdering.

[RodneyB]

Yes its on a CAT5 Cable on a 100 Meg router, the PC has no wireless card in it

So no one else has this probelm ?

[charli181]

I was having a similar problem when I was running an external USB drive that contained my media and also a usb web cam that streamed at the same time from the main server. If I shutdown the webcam all was fine. Is your 2TB internal drives or external via USB?

[RodneyB]

The Drives are all internal SATA2 500GB

[charli181]

sorry not much help then. Maybe look at your network card drivers or advanced settings of the NIC. Other than that ?????

[phertiker]

Yeah, make sure the link speed / duplex mode / media type / etc is set for auto negotiation on both machines. You'll find that on the Advanced tab of your ethernet adapter in Device Manager.

You aren't using a managed switch, are you? How about just a straight file transfer using windows sharing?

You can sort of gauge how the network is doing by opening up the Task Manager and switching to the Networking tab. For a plain file transfer it should use 70 or 80% of a 100 mbit link.

Unfortunately that test pretty much ends there because my network (well, it's mainly Samba which is better at windows shares than windows is) takes about 5% when streaming a 720p x264 file off of an external USB HDD. So who knows.

[RodneyB]

Thanks I'll try that tonight

I am not running a torrent at the time but if you are all saying that it should work without a cache setting then I'll treat it like a networking problem

Maybe a Second card and bridge ? I'll try a few things

[Savage1701]

I just stumbled across this because of another problem I am having, but have you considered a network switch that has QoS features? They are pretty common and don't really add to the cost of the switch. If you are cabled for 5E I would consider gigabit switching as well.

Also, as a network tech once told me, not all switches are created equal. The cheapest ones have low-capacity switching fabric. They may technically hit their mark, but start loading anything onto the network and they fall apart in terms of speed, etc. I think the analogy is like in the 80's when every stereo manufacturer was quoting higher and higher wattages for their amps, but they in fact sounded terrible at those levels. They could only hit the numbers under tightly-controlled, narrow-range lab-type tests, and still sounded awful.

Oh, and one other thing, I stumbled across an obscure problem where WinXP put the wrong ethernet driver on my NIC, even though it looked like a correct choice. I had to force the correct one on. That fixed a number of baffling network issues for me.