problem streaming movies over wireless network

H

hardc0re

Gawd
Joined
Sep 19, 2006
Messages
869
Hey,

Using VLC player, when streaming video over wireless network to a laptop, the stream starts to get choppy after about 10-15 seconds and video freezes up. This occurs to all type of video media, no matter the codec used.

- It works fine however over wired. I've changed all the settings of the wireless adapter to achieve max performance but the problem still occurs.

- Method to access the video files is simply from windows network drive.

-Network utilization when playing movies is usually between 1-10%, cpu goes to 70% max when streaming 720P, also RAM usage is about 70% , so I've already ruled out insufficient hardware.

The laptop runs windows vista, has a celeron M processor, 1 GB ram broadcom 802.11 g network adapter set to 54 mbps. The router also has the same bandwidth.

Anyone encounter this problem too? or can suggest a workaround?
 
Over wired I see 720p streaming to my PS3 take 50 to 60mbps, being on 11g you aren't going to be able to sustain that. Regardless of the speed your adapter is reporting reaching 54mbps is near impossible in real world scenarios, you're going to need to stick to wired or pull the file over before watching instead.
 
pretty much what he said. Or upgrade everything to wireless N. Hi def eats a lot of bandwith and, hell streaming any media does it. G just isnt fast enough.
 
The advertised 54Mb/s rate is the raw data rate available for the wireless connection. You'll get much lower than that for user data - typically 22Mb/s over a 54Mb/s link. 720p is about 19Mb/s, so you're pushing it even on a perfect 802.11g connection.

Like the others said, you just need a faster network, whether it's wired or 802.11n.
 
The strange thing is though the wireless activity isn't sustained.

it looks like it pulls a large chunk of data at first which plays in VLC, network activity near stops, but when the next chunk is getting pulled, the video get choppy and just stops. Maybe it's the way windows handles file streaming over network shares? or the way VLC buffers data?

Watching High def media over the internet is no problem though. I can stream 720P from youtube no problem.
 
You can tweak the caching level in VLC, but keep in mind that when youtube streams the data it's compressed more since most people don't have 20+mbps connections, even then the delay on the stream is part of the buffering process, for me that's usually a few seconds just to get the initial buffer. As I recall VLC only buffers about half a second of data by default. Try setting that to 5 seconds and see if it helps, you should just need to add a zero, I think it's in milliseconds.
 
For VLC to play nice with streaming over WLAN you need to set the buffer/cache sizes much higher.
 
Another solution is to use Orb...it's a pretty nice program, and it can auto detect your network and adjust the speeds to even out the playback...I haven't used anything else since I got this setup.
 
memnoch_thedevil said:
Another solution is to use Orb...it's a pretty nice program, and it can auto detect your network and adjust the speeds to even out the playback...I haven't used anything else since I got this setup.
Click to expand...

Does this help at all with LAN traffic? I don't really see the point unless you are using it for WAN stuff.
 
i messed around with the cache from VLC, i dont know exactly what I was doing really, but more of the cahce sizes for the codecs were 300ms, i put them to 1000 but the problem persists...
 
Play around with your wireless configuration. There's no guarantee it will work, but I have successfully played 720p content over 802.11g. 1080p isn't really usable though. Change channels, see if your gear supports 'turbo' mode wide channels, make sure you have no 802.11b clients, try changing encryption modes etc. Basically getting satisfactory performance out of wireless is a pain in the ass, and getting *stable* performance is difficult.

You're also skating pretty close to the lower limit CPU wise for playing 720p I think. Try using CoreAVC, and find out how much the CPU usage goes up when you stream vs. play locally. Some crappy NIC drivers use a surprising amount of CPU.
 
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