Streaming DVD from HDs on home network: speed, cable, router question (1 Viewer)

[Samuel_Fred]

I've got a WDTV Plus hooked up to my system downstairs, and a lot of music and movies on hard drives upstairs. The music plays perfectly through the WDTV, and avi and mkv and wmv files also play fine. But rips of DVDs tend to have problems. They pause, as if buffering, every 30 seconds to couple minutes. So my question is: what's causing this? I'm using the standard 2Wire router that came with my AT&T DSL. I'm running an ethernet cable to the WDTV (not wireless). Shouldn't this router be able to handle the 10mps peak that watching a DVD requires? Is my network speed different than my internet download/uploads speeds? Is it affected by simultaneous downloading or uploading? How can I check it? Do I need a new router? I notice new ones have Gigibit ethernet. Does that require a special cable? Etc. etc. Your help is greatly appreciated. EDIT: So I used LAN Speed Test to determine the speed between my HTPC upstairs and WDTV downstairs: 49 mbps writing / 44 mbps reading. I'm using a cat5e ethernet cable. A DVD doesn't ever peak much higher than 10 or maximum 12 mbps, so what's going on here?

 

[David Willow]

First thing I would look at is the codec/ripper program you are using. Without getting into details here (forum rules), make sure you are following the recommendations for your WDTV. I have had issues in the past with cheap routers. When we were beta testing the streaming between DirecTV receivers I had all sorts of issues. At first I assumed it was because of the beta software, but others where not having these issues. After a few weeks I replaced my cheap Netgear with a higher end Linksys. My problems disappeared instantly. Its not just about speed - the router needs the processor and memory to handle the continuous throughput.