witeless htpc?

[UberGoober]

Good evening everyone, I'm new here so i hope people with more experience can lend me their knowledge.

I have 6 computers on my network, one computer in particular is running Windows 7 with a gigabit network connection to a wireless g router (soon to be a wireless n draft) and has wmc running with the mymovies plugin and another plugin that uses a vcd driver to mount ISO images inside media center. I own the specific dvd movies on the computer which hosts a 10tb raid 5 array and about 500 dvd titles.

What I want to to have happen is for other media center machines on the network to be able to stream the uncompressed iso images without pausing for a second here and there like it currently is on the 802.11g network. File sharing and network permissions are not an issue, but how much bandwidth is needed is an unknown factor to me at the moment.

Ideally I would like 2 pc's to be able to connect to the server and play different movies at the same time wirelessly. I was thinking of connecting the server to the gigabit port on a new router that had a gigabit LAN connection with wireless n draft capabilities.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

[Eric Martello]

You should be able to stream the DVD ISOs since they'd still be in MPEG-2 format with an effective bitrate in the 10 Mbps range...the problem is that WiFi is not the best medium for streaming anything because it is prone to interference. What kind of router are you using and does it support any kind of features that improve streaming? Even with all that, the quality of the wireless receivers on the other as well as signal strength can play a big part in the viability of streaming DVDs to multiple computers at once. The effective bandwidth of a wifi connection is rarely the same as what they claim the maximum bandwidth to be.

Another issue you may be running into is the raid-5 array. Are you using a dedicated raid controller for this array, or are you just using the motherboard's built in fake raid? Either way, raid-5 is generally a bad choice for streaming anything because each read/write operation must be spread over 3 or more drives.

[UberGoober]

The raid5 is not on the motherboard it is a 8 port add-on card, also the read speed of the array has been measured over 400mbs (not bit).

Small update, I haven't purchased the wireless n router yet but I have connected the server to the router and tried to stream movies on 2 wireless computers at the same time and one works perfectly and the other one started rough but the pickups were due to a bad WiFi card and under powered machine, which will be dealt with shortly. I did monitor the server performance logs while streaming, and everything was below 5% usage including the raid array so no issues with that.

[FromEnvirmRor]

Well it wasnt that big of a waste, it was 6 bucks for the adapter...my HTPC doesnt actually have a video specific card, just the onboard video. Im thinking i will find a video card for it with S Video then and just run it out to RCA...The only video outputs I have on my HTPC as of right now is VGA, HDMI, and DVI.


Thanks for the insight too, much appreciated..

[keith_h]

(IMG:http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/421992_3171979827564_1507573815_3047546_154717565_n.jpg)

Here's one way to do it.

I have a dedicated N WAP (300Mbps) connected to the gigabit backbone (1Gbps obviously). Watch out you don't accidentally have anything connected to a 100Mbps port anywhere. The N makes a big difference and you'll be able to stream with ease. The white box on right is the NAS so media server @ 1GBPS wired straight to the switch.

My HTPC box elsewhere in the house has a wireless N card and I can report this setup works as expected.

WAP and card were less than $100-00, well worth the investment.