Streaming DivX/Xvid/Video_TS from PC to Mac

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Fedorov

Guest
Hi all,

Sorry for the long post, thought I'd at least explain what I've tried so far and hope you Mac/wireless experts can offer me some good advice...

I decided the Mac Mini was the perfect/quiet/small size to use in the living room as a media centre for my Plasma TV.

Apart from surfing, my main requirement is to watch downloaded US tv episodes etc... I usually download all these to my PC and I've got them in a shared folder which I can access on the Mac Mini.

So far, whether it is a 700mb Xvid or (more extreme?) Video_TS folder on my PC's hard drive if I try to play them on the Mac with VLC Media Player I get the video/sound freezing briefly every 5-10 seconds, not really watchable.

My PC *was* wired to a Belkin WirelessG Highspeed Router, after looking at firmware issues I noticed that this model has a lot of "packet loss" issues reported and while it's never been an issue for my 2 wired PCs or wireless PocketPC something is causing this freezing issue to the Mac.

Note that I tried copying one of the 700mb Xvid files across to the Mac and it froze while 10% through copying, it actually needed a reboot of the Mac!
Transferring LARGE files wirelessly I know can also be a problem with many routers/firmware...

My friend has a Belkin Pre-N router and his streaming to his Mac Mini appears much smoother even though I possibly have a better signal strength to my Mac.

So, as my Belkin router is the older v1000 hardware I decided it was worthwhile getting a newer model... staying away from the ghastly unstable v5 firmware Linksys I got a Linksys WRT54GS v4 firmware model yesterday which comes with 1.05.03 firmware on it...

Tried streaming a movie to the Mac again, I've got slightly less freezing but it still does it way too often to be watchable.

I've now tried copying a large 700mb file across and that now works okay with the Linksys :)

So my question is... is anyone else streaming video to their mac wirelessly? is it smooth? what suggestions has anyone got so I can achieve my dream? Smile
Is it even possible to stream this stuff smoothly through the airwaves???

Thanks in advance to you all.

Fedorov.
 
OP
G

Grimbo

Guest
Fedorov said:
My friend has a Belkin Pre-N router and his streaming to his Mac Mini appears much smoother even though I possibly have a better signal strength to my Mac.

His setup is just better than yours - learn to live with it :dive:
 
OP
F

Fedorov

Guest
Update1: Grimbo DOES also have this issue when we tested Xvid's of a similar size.

Update2: I stumbled upon a thread over on the VLC media player forums where others were having Xvid freezing/choppiness... there is a setting in VLC to change the size of the buffer cache - it uses a very small one by default (300). Setting it to something above 2000 cured my problem. Some other Xvid's I tried I needed to increase it to 6000.

Haven't seen any freezing in any of the clips I've tried since! :)

Glad it turns out to be a VLC issue rather than a PC/router/Mac hardware issue :)

Fedorov.
 

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