brashquido
19th March 2003, 06:05
Hi All,
I use PowerDVD XP4.0 on my HTPC for DVD playback ,and also use it to preview DVD's I author through the DVD from HDD option. Until now I've been using a standard Ethernet 10/100 NIC connected to a 100MBit switch which I had no problems with.
I have now moved house and physical cable is not an option, so I'm looking to move my HTPC to a wireless solution using an 11MBit (802.11b) connection. This should be enough bandwidth for DVD playback over the network if nothing else is using it, but the problem other people doing this seem to be having is that wireless is unable to deliver contiunous throughput at this speed, and the resulting DVD playback over the network jumps/skips. People are having to slow there wireless speed down to 4Mbit or lower to get a solid contiuous throughput.
This obviously is not sufficient for DVD playback over a network as a DVD can peak at upto 9Mbit, so my question is, is there any kind of file caching utility available for Windows 2000 that can be used to buffer files so that sources with low, inconsistent, or bursting bandwidth can remove this jerking/skipping problem? I figure if a caching utility could buffer several MB of the movie, then have PowerDVD read from the cache file instead of the actual source would eliminate network lag.
I see that you can get something like this for a linux from www.videolan.org, but as yet I've found nothing for Windows 2000.
I use PowerDVD XP4.0 on my HTPC for DVD playback ,and also use it to preview DVD's I author through the DVD from HDD option. Until now I've been using a standard Ethernet 10/100 NIC connected to a 100MBit switch which I had no problems with.
I have now moved house and physical cable is not an option, so I'm looking to move my HTPC to a wireless solution using an 11MBit (802.11b) connection. This should be enough bandwidth for DVD playback over the network if nothing else is using it, but the problem other people doing this seem to be having is that wireless is unable to deliver contiunous throughput at this speed, and the resulting DVD playback over the network jumps/skips. People are having to slow there wireless speed down to 4Mbit or lower to get a solid contiuous throughput.
This obviously is not sufficient for DVD playback over a network as a DVD can peak at upto 9Mbit, so my question is, is there any kind of file caching utility available for Windows 2000 that can be used to buffer files so that sources with low, inconsistent, or bursting bandwidth can remove this jerking/skipping problem? I figure if a caching utility could buffer several MB of the movie, then have PowerDVD read from the cache file instead of the actual source would eliminate network lag.
I see that you can get something like this for a linux from www.videolan.org, but as yet I've found nothing for Windows 2000.