United Kingdom
Mate I messed around having exactly the same problem as you and spent hours of time and effort trying to sort out rubbish playback of HD on my client bedroom PC. This sorted the issue:-
1) gigabit wired LAN with decent quality cables. I wouldn't bother with wireless, power line adapters etc
2) setup codecs to use LAV. Put on video acceleration (cuvid) if you have nvidia and select 3d settings to on in nvidia control panel. Set your GPU as the processor on both machines.
3) minimise bandwidth useage on network when watching tv. I mean don't download stuff, scrape fanart etc. Set plugins (if u use them) to do the processing stuff in the middle of the night (or use another PC)
4) Share your folders
5) Turn off firewall for intranet
6) install tv server and client on clean installs of windows 7, turn off updates and only install drivers required.
7) use separate time shifting and recorded tv hard drives. I've just been messing about with this recently as I always had a problem when something was recording and I had both clients watching satellite tv things would freeze up. This seems to now be fixed.
8) if your using any plugins on the client such as MP tv series, check the video files are not corrupt and can be parsed correctly. I found some of my movies and tv shows could not be correctly scanned on my client because they were corrupt, this dragged the performance of my whole network down. When I deleted the corrupt files, rescanned my media mediaportal client ran twice as quick!!!
9) resource monitor tool with windows is really helpful. I've used it a lot with my setup to identify bottlenecks and although it's taken me rather a lot of time and effort I now have a tv server in my lounge and client in my bedroom that works reliably and can stream hd no problem. I was initially thinking it was settings or codecs in mediaportal causing stuttering and shit playback when actually under 'network' you could see the spikes and bandwidth shoot up when I tried to watch any HD TV. I run a 2.4ghz quad core with 8gb ram on win7 64 bit for my server and the only bottleneck I've noticed is with network performance. I was going to ask the question on here is it worth the money investing in an expensive top of the range gigabit network switch, fibre network etc...I'm not sure yet.
Hope this helps
1) gigabit wired LAN with decent quality cables. I wouldn't bother with wireless, power line adapters etc
2) setup codecs to use LAV. Put on video acceleration (cuvid) if you have nvidia and select 3d settings to on in nvidia control panel. Set your GPU as the processor on both machines.
3) minimise bandwidth useage on network when watching tv. I mean don't download stuff, scrape fanart etc. Set plugins (if u use them) to do the processing stuff in the middle of the night (or use another PC)
4) Share your folders
5) Turn off firewall for intranet
6) install tv server and client on clean installs of windows 7, turn off updates and only install drivers required.
7) use separate time shifting and recorded tv hard drives. I've just been messing about with this recently as I always had a problem when something was recording and I had both clients watching satellite tv things would freeze up. This seems to now be fixed.
8) if your using any plugins on the client such as MP tv series, check the video files are not corrupt and can be parsed correctly. I found some of my movies and tv shows could not be correctly scanned on my client because they were corrupt, this dragged the performance of my whole network down. When I deleted the corrupt files, rescanned my media mediaportal client ran twice as quick!!!
9) resource monitor tool with windows is really helpful. I've used it a lot with my setup to identify bottlenecks and although it's taken me rather a lot of time and effort I now have a tv server in my lounge and client in my bedroom that works reliably and can stream hd no problem. I was initially thinking it was settings or codecs in mediaportal causing stuttering and shit playback when actually under 'network' you could see the spikes and bandwidth shoot up when I tried to watch any HD TV. I run a 2.4ghz quad core with 8gb ram on win7 64 bit for my server and the only bottleneck I've noticed is with network performance. I was going to ask the question on here is it worth the money investing in an expensive top of the range gigabit network switch, fibre network etc...I'm not sure yet.
Hope this helps
) The whole media system works great, so I have never really persevered to get the server to run above at 100Mbps. The GF knows how to use it and is now actually lost when the system has gone down; usually due to me fiddling to be honest.