Wireless v Wired v Powerline

[reddwarfcrew]

Okay, so I'm copying all my blurays to a NAS drive to view on my various TVs/macbooks etc throughout the house.

Now I've copied the blurays as full bit for bit so are anything from 20-40Gb in size. The problem I have is that the blurays will only play on equipment fully wired, they won't play without constant buffering on either wireless or powerline.

On my test Bluray, it is 28Mbps bitrate when I view the file info. On my Macbook, if I do a speed test, it can download off the internet at 38Mb (ie limited by the speed of my fibre connection), so wireless playing a 28Mbps file shouldn't be a problem should it?

Am I missing something? It's not a major problem as I've put cat5 throughout the house, but I'm intrigued as to why wireless and powerline adapters can't cope.

[dragon2611]

You will need more than 28Mbit/s to play a 28Mbit/s video stream as there will be network overheads to take into account, that said it will also depend on the protocol being used to stream this video as to what the overheads are.

[reddwarfcrew]

I've been doing some playing and I think it's the plex server that's actually making it require such high bandwidth. If I play the mkv direct using VLC player then it's fine. Guess I need to do some more digging on the settings.

[dragon2611]

If you are using Plex depending on the device/client and the settings the server might try and transcode the video before playing it.

That works fine if your Plex server is a Nice powerful machine, but if the Plex server is a NAS or a low end machine then it isn't going to work. Mines running on an Atom and if it tries to transcode I mights as well watch a slideshow

[seawright]

For anyone not happy with their wifi speed who are considering powerline adaptors as a viable alternative Ebuyer are currently offering D-Link Twin Pack 500Mbps Mini PowerLine Adapters (DHP-309AV/B) for £14.99 with free delivery.