Is the Wifi useless?

[moose09876]

Patriot wireless adapter, full bars. Detected network speed on the PBO ranges from 13MB/s to 6MB/s. 1080p? forget it. 720p is BARELY watchable. Absolutely NO lag when using wired connection. I'm using a Cisco enterprise level access point with 7dBi antennas. There should be NO problem playing 720p over wifi. PBO is running 02 firmware, just upgraded last night. Did nothing, if not made it worse. Anybody else having this problem / have a fix? It's not worth keeping the dam thing If i'm going to have to spend another $75+ on wireless N adapters and an access point.. ARGH!

[h3llphyre]

works fine with divx at DVD quality.

It's a known quantity that WirelessG doesn't work for highdef feeds. It's that way with everything.

[moose09876]

It'd be nice of them if they listed that before you bought it.....

[h3llphyre]

It'd be nice of them if they listed that before you bought it.....

802.11g is an industry standard. I'm not sure that Patriot needs to say "Wireless G isn't fast enough for all video".

[moose09876]

I can stream 720p to my laptop just fine, over G. No hiccups at all.

[RamboKid]

Is the Wifi useless?
YES, for both wifi and wired! However, if the media has low bitrate, wired lan will work, and wifi lan may work depending on how low. To playback high bitrate medias, use USB drive until the PBO network layer is overhauled. I hope this is not a SOC limitation.

FYI, large file does not imply high bitrate! For example, a 6hrs media with low biterate encoding can be large; a 1hr media with high biterate can be large too. PBO should handle the former without problem via LAN, but not the latter.

I spent half a day to dump the NAS contents to the USB drive!

[moose09876]

The highest bitrate movie I have is Eagle Eye in 1080p. 18GB. It plays just fine over the wired. If you have to put everything to a USB drive, whats the point in having the PBO?

[treker]

Moose, I can see your point about streaming. I decided not to bother with watching live streaming HD video. So, I installed a low priced hard drive in my PBO. I then stream over wired connection all the video I want to the drive and later, watch glitchfree 1080p. Yes, it takes a while over the 10/100mps network (wishing it had gigabit!). And it would take longer over b/g wifi...but then you have it on the internal drive and can watch whatever, whenever, glitchfree. My solution. May not work for everyone. But the PBO is superior to my first media player - original WDTV. Once I got the fan quieted down, it's a keeper for me... for now... until the 'near perfect' media player comes out that plays every format.

[warzouing]

I don't know if all media players shoud mention the fact that to Wirelessly Stream HD videos you will need N router and N Usb Adapter supported by their player. As almost all of them are running Linux, they should mention what adapters using what chipset are supported. I have used 3 wireless media players so far to stream from my PC (Mediagate 450HD, WD HD TV, Patriot) and besides the Mediagate that accept only G (thus no DVD nor HD stream, only standard DIVX/XVID/MP4) the other 2 cope quite well with HD stream from a N network.

[moose09876]

Problem is, that I have 6TB of HD movies. Can't really store that on the internal drive. LOL!

[RamboKid]

The highest bitrate movie I have is Eagle Eye in 1080p. 18GB. It plays just fine over the wired. If you have to put everything to a USB drive, whats the point in having the PBO?1080P is high resolution, but does not mean high bitrate!!!! You need to use utility program to read the encoded video bitrate of the media file. Try playing >= 15mbps video bitrate via wired lan, add audio and overhead, on a 25-30mbps PBO network bottleneck!

I use GraphEdit from http://shark007.net/tools.html

[windsurf]

OK, couple things.

1. Wired 10/100 works fine with full 1080p. If its not working for you, you have a network problem or a server problem.

2. Wireless. So far I haven't been able to get any wireless G working effectively. However, I'm going to do a little troubleshooting tomorrow. I want to eliminate ALL the other wireless devices. I'm going to set up a second G AP and see what happens when just the PBO is connected. G has some serious issues with data when any legacy B connects to it. Not real hopeful, but I figure its worth a shot.

3. My 2 storage devices (DLINK 321 and Linksys Mediahub) both have gigabit connections. However, as I learned the hard way, they can't do near that speed. Best I've gotten is about 72Mbps on a 1000 Mbps port. They're nice because they are low power, small, etc. However, a PC will give you more like 600Mbps with an average Gigabit NIC. I'm pretty sure it'll serve a single PBO without a problem since the PBO is 100M. However, I'm concerned about what will happen if more than one is trying to connect to the same media source. We'll see...

[windsurf]

All of the HD media at 1080P is MP4. I've converted all my Blu-Ray to that format. THe only computer I had that could play an MT2S native blu-ray rip was my I7-920 with a screaming video card. A little pricey to put at every tv. Figured the it wouldn't be fair to ask the PBO to do it either. MP4 works fine. I will be also looking at MT2X on a directly connected hard drive. That'll resolve network v processing as the culprit. We'll see...

[moose09876]

My PC is a 2.5 Ghz core 2 quad with a $60 video card. It streams any 1080p movie I have at < 25% CPU usage. The wired PBO works great. Wireless is useless for anything HD. Thanks for all the help.

[aasoror]

3. My 2 storage devices (DLINK 321 and Linksys Mediahub) ... However, I'm concerned about what will happen if more than one is trying to connect to the same media source. We'll see...

I can confirm that I can access play SD/HD contents on the same drive in the DNS-321 from 2 PBOs and 1 PC simultaneously without any problems NAS side ;)

Different contents from the same drive is a tougher test than same content from the same drive because there is locality in this case.

The crippled gigabit speeds on the DNS-321 is never a problem when streaming (1080p raw BR is only 5 MB/s anyway), the problem is actually when copying file and of course when loading the contents to the NAS.