[mythtv-users] Does your wireless work better than mine?

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Mon Jan 19 02:15:44 UTC 2009


I've tried wireless G without a hop in the middle and it couldn't handle it.
And I don't have neighboors running wireless to interfere. Wireless G, IMO,
isn't up to the challenge. A hop will make it worse, not better. The router
in the middle has to receive a packet, store it, and re-transmit it to the
next machine. That's where the 1/2 speed penalty comes in when people are
doing that. Only one device can transmit at a time on wireless, so
everything has to wait while one station transmits. Wired networks
(switched) don't have this problem. An HD stream is about 20 mbit/sec,
that's about what most wireless G networks can handle with some interference
or walls, etc.. If you get any other traffic at all on the network, even
DHCP and ARP requests, you won't be able to get the streams through without
loss. Since you're streaming, you can't afford to wait and re-transmit.
Don't worry too much about the connection speed reported by the wireless
stuff. It really doesn't mean anything. There is a ton of overhead involved
that they don't tell you about. Just because they SAY it's connected at 54
Mbit/sec, that doesn't mean you can get that much data to the other end.

Short version, wireless sucks for this sort of thing, run the cat5/cat6.
Even powerline devices would probably be better.
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