Questions about sharing movies around a house

bluferbl

Hoping to get some pointers about the best way of going about sharing movies around a house. A customer has asked me to look into this for him...he has an Asus eee mini PC in the sitting room, connected to a big flat screen via HDMI, the eee has a wireless internet connection. In three bedrooms there are PCs and he wants to be able to watch movies stored on the eee in the bedrooms. The bedroom PCs have wireless cards. Here's some questions: 1. Is WiFi fast enough to stream movies from one location in the house to another? 2. The eee has a single hard drive...how many movies could be watched at once? 3. Is he barking up the wrong tree? I s there a better way to do this? Any advice appreciated! Thanks, David

snappieT

So all you need to do is enable file sharing on the eeePC, pretty simple to do. Regarding wifi viewing, it all depends on the bitrate of the movie. Standard definition should be fine, 720p is probably pushing it, and 1080p doesn't stand a chance. The read time on the hard drive shouldn't present an issue, though that ultimately falls back to the bitrate of the video being streamed again.

lmimmfn

If there are 3 bedroom PC's why is he using a crappy eee as the media server?
Are you on about streaming the same video to several locations or being able to play 3 different movies on those PCs at any one time? in which case i think the eee will just die. Also the wifi will struggle with that even if they all have a great signal. 2 SD movies should easily play well over wifi( G+ ) . I can barely get 1 1080p movie playing over wifi G+ with my server and media centre in the same room and 10 feet apart. N+ would sort out the wifi bandwidth problem though, but forget playing 3 720p or 1080p movies at the same time even with N+

ED E

Buy a NAS(Networked HDD) and connect to the router. Done:)

lmimmfn

Lethal_Bullet wrote: »

Buy a NAS(Networked HDD) and connect to the router. Done:)

much better idea than using an eee, but id just use one of those PC's as the server for media, much cheaper to stick a load of cheapo sata 2 drives in.

bluferbl

If there was a NAS attached to the router and everything was cabled together, how many of the 4 locations i.e. TV downstairs plus 3 bedrooms, would be able to watch content at the same time? What I mean is, if there's a single disk in the NAS, how much content would it be able to dish out at once?

Overheal

snappieT wrote: »

720p is probably pushing it, and 1080p doesn't stand a chance.

Untrue. Wireless G would be the push, and I have done it, streaming Iron Man 1080p from the laptop to the desktop. Both were wireless, which immediately affects your bandwidth. Now, if you have the host machine on an ethernet cable and stream to a wireless device, you have an even better connection; Wireless is fine to stream hi-def movies. However, in a heavy traffic network (3+ PCs) I'd assume you'd want at least N to keep it stable.

If there was a NAS attached to the router and everything was cabled together, how many of the 4 locations i.e. TV downstairs plus 3 bedrooms, would be able to watch content at the same time? What I mean is, if there's a single disk in the NAS, how much content would it be able to dish out at once?

well it cant just broadcast the same movie to each the same way tv does: the NAS needs to open up a unique connection to each PC. It's plenty capable of providing the same file to multiple machines though and allowing each PC to view/seek through the video as they please without disturbing the others. For this though I would again reccomend N. Possibly a dual-band N router, for even further performance stability.

ED E

As overheal has said, the read speed of any decent NAS wont really be the bottleneck. Definitely not with a single file as on a reasonably sorted disk the head wont have to seek much. Even with three the buffers should hold up. The wireless is going to be the issue.

On one aerial you'll have big competition for bandwidth. As above you could use a wireless N but, IIRC the clients(PCs) would need to be N compatible for that to work? Many machines arent.

Something else you should know, if you have lots of video on drives vs DVDs I'm guessing you download most/all of it. Downloading while streaming video would cut into the wireless bandwidth and the disk performance and would have to be avoided.

If I were in you're position I'd do the following:
A. Buy a NAS, something like this: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=586 (That 199USD price is excessive, it can be found for less, just ensure its the networked version).[We have one for backups at a safe distance from the source machines, works very well]

B. Buy a second router/Wireless N router. Personally I'd go for a second one. You connect the new router with a network cable to the original, and then set it as a second Access Point, doubling you're wireless bandwidth(EE+PC on one, 2xPC on two). Then connect your NAS, also wired, to the primary router. Job done. Also, if you decide to expand later you should have spare network ports to add additional NAS/Consoles/PCs etc etc:)