802.11n and HD video content.

[Bizkitkid2001]

I am going to be signing a lease on a new apartment soon and this new apartment comes with an attached garage (Not direct access though) and in this garage is a large storage room (Seperate from where the car will park)

Now, I plan on either building a Windows Home Server or buying one of the many premade options from Acer, HP, or others. The garage is well insulated and stays extremely cool, even during the hot summer. I visited the apartment yesterday when it was in the afternoon and 95°F, the garage was a cool 72°F. What my ideal situation would be is to turn that extra storage room in the garage into my server room. It has electrical plugs but no Ethernet ports jacks, so I would have to go wireless if I did this.


My only concern is that right now I have an 802.11g network and it can not stream HD content, even compressed HD content (transcoded 10-15mbps 1080p signal) I know that even though 802.11g advertised a 54mbps connection, in reality, most people get 10-15mbps between computers. You would think that it should work, but the device that is serving the file is also wireless. So the router in a sense would have to be able to have a bandwidth of 20-30mbps. (10-15mbps upload for the server and 10-15mbps download for the HTPC recieving the file)

I want to know if getting a Wireless N router would be fast enough to stream my HD content? ALso, lets say I have one device that is still 802.11g (So it is limited to the 10-15mbps bandwidth) and it is streaming from the server that is connected with an 802.11n card. Can the router do the 20-30mbps total bandwidth, or will it automatically cut the total bandwidth (For uploading and downloading) to the 802.11g speeds?

Thanks,
-Biz


PS. - Ask any questions if you don't fully understand what I am saying.

[GroundZero3]

N clients will not bump down its speeds if B/G clients connects

In theory it should be able stream it with no problems, but ive never had a chance to test it out. Of course, the computer that will be viewing the HD content plays a big part in it too. I have some HD video I can test out some streaming with N clients over the weekend to my Mac.

[Bizkitkid2001]

That is good to know that it will not bump down the speeds. I have a PS3 and use PS3 media server ps3mediaserver - Project Hosting on Google Code to encode and compress video files for playback on the PS3. It has been able to do absolutely everything I have tried so far. (MP4, AAC, MKV, AC3 Surround Audio, Divx, Xvid, ect..) as well as subtitles (Gotta have my anime )

I would install the PS3 media server onto my Windows Home Server box and transcode the videos I want to stream to my PS3. (So I will be avoiding the cheap Intel Atom based servers as a C2D or higher is required for HD transcoding) It works great for everything under 8mbps over Wireless G, but it gets choppy with a lot of buffering with anything higher than compressed 720p video. (About 80% of my videos are now HD).

Also, the current router I have is a Linksys 802.11g running on a linux firmware that I got from a recommendation from RobRich as the non linux Linksys routers would also crash with large bittorrent files.

So can I get a recommendation on a stable wireless N router (Maybe another Linux based Linksys router) or one that supports DD-WRT firmware?

[GroundZero3]

Transcoding is a whole different animal, I think I tried to use ps3media server with my 360 and my X2 couldn't keep up. (of course im sure running vmware on it didnt help!)

Im currently running DD-WRT on this:

WNDR3300 - RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Router

I took a leap of faith with netgear, I usually stay away from it but its was about 100 bucks but it works fairly well, and its nice to separate the b/G clients to the 2.4ghz radio and the N clients to the 5ghz radios. I think DD-WRT is still catching up with the N and has a limitation when it comes to N speeds. Let me see if I can find the thread about that.

[Bizkitkid2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GroundZero3

Transcoding is a whole different animal, I think I tried to use ps3media server with my 360 and my X2 couldn't keep up. (of course im sure running vmware on it didnt help!)

When transcoding a 1080p, AC3 5.1 surround sound h.264 movie my i7 will go from 50% to 80%, and that is overclocked to 3.2ghz from 2.66ghz. I think a C2D would be fast enough as the PS3 media server can be set to buffer for several gigabytes. I would just have to wait a minute for the server to transcode before I start the movie on the PS3, unless I got an i7 server

[Bizkitkid2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GroundZero3

Transcoding is a whole different animal, I think I tried to use ps3media server with my 360 and my X2 couldn't keep up. (of course im sure running vmware on it didnt help!)

Im currently running DD-WRT on this:

WNDR3300 - RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Router

I took a leap of faith with netgear, I usually stay away from it but its was about 100 bucks but it works fairly well, and its nice to separate the b/G clients to the 2.4ghz radio and the N clients to the 5ghz radios. I think DD-WRT is still catching up with the N and has a limitation when it comes to N speeds. Let me see if I can find the thread about that.

Now, when you mean seperate them, does that mean that the media server won't be able to stream to my PS3 on 802.11g unless it was set to 802.11g as well?

[RobRich]

Separate, as in using different bands for B/G and N. It is still presented as a single network, but with B/G devices on the 2.4GHz band and N devices on the 5GHz band. Helps minimize RF interference between the different classes of devices. Some routers offer multiple integrated WiFi radios and support to set specific bands depending upon the connection type.

[GroundZero3]

Rob is correct, all B/G everyone and there mom has is 2.4 ghz which can cause connection issues (on top of all the appliances in the world that use that frequency). 5ghz is being used by newer cordless phones, but one thing you need to watch out for. The higher the frequency, the shorter the distance you can cover.

[Bizkitkid2001]

The distance is around 30 feet and the signal would go through two walls.

[PoonDoggy]

Where ya movin' to? and have you considered using the plug line adapters using the electrical lines as a hard line?

Maybe something like this: Asoka USA > Products

Let me know if you want to test them...I have a set that I acquired from Asoka and havent had a chance to utilize them yet.