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