[mythtv-users] ASUS Eee Box as a Myth Front End ?

[Scott Alfter]

On 8/23/2011 03:29, Neil Cooper wrote:
> On Mon, 8/22/11, Niklas Brunlid <prefect47 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Does 2.4GHz work well for SD/HD recordings over the MythTV protocol when
>> there are many devices around?
> 
> I haven't tried 802-11N  but I've tried B, G and A (on 5Ghz) and never
> found a wi-fi solution that has sufficient bandwidth to make a good  enough
> connection to watch video with DVD (or higher) resolution without
> dropouts.

I had reasonable success a while back streaming video (up to 1080p H.264) over
802.11a (would've done 802.11n, but the driver for the USB WiFi dongle I was
using didn't implement 802.11n support at the time...maybe that's since
changed).  HD MPEG-2 recorded from TV was occasionally troublesome if the
bitrate started getting too far above 10-12 Mbps, but HD H.264 is generally no
more than 6-8 Mbps (unless you're trying to stream a Bluray rip that you've
not transcoded to a more reasonable bitrate).

One caveat: Matroska files stream pretty horribly from storage groups to
remote frontends.  My observation was that it'd try to burst something like
15-20 seconds' worth of video through, then go idle.  Over a wired network,
there's enough available bandwidth that this doesn't present a problem, but
over WiFi, this invariably caused frequent prebuffering pauses.  Streaming
directly from a NAS box to the frontend over SMB wasn't any better; in fact, I
had been using that and switched to storage groups to see if they'd be any
better.  I ended up repackaging most of my video as MPEG transport streams;
while these have more storage overhead in the NAS box, they stream more reliably.

(I ended up moving into a house about 6 months ago that was prewired by the
builder.  w00t!  The USB WiFi a/b/g/n dongle is now sitting idle; the 5-GHz
access point is serving mostly as a gigabit switch since the switch on my desk
died a while back and I've not gotten around to replacing it.)

Scott Alfter
scott at alfter.us