Playing Video From Shared Folders

[Fishbong]

One of the things i've been looking forward for most is the ability to connect the Pandora to my TV and play movies from network shares. As it looks like i'm not receiving my Pandora for a couple of months, i'd like to ask if anyone has already tried that and what the results are.
I've been reading a lot about slow wifi as of late, is it enough to stream SD videos? If not, is the situation likely to improve?

 

[electrocity]

You probably will not be able to do this with the wifi driver in it's current state. It's difficult enough just streaming mp3s let alone video. The situation should improve once the drivers are worked on, but I couldn't say what sort of bitrate you'd be capable of achieving. If you have a large TV in your living space, you're going to want a reasonably high bitrate video, unless you like a pixelated mess.

 

[jdbye]

Some people have had more wifi success than others, I imagine if the wifi works well, so will streaming. Streaming any SD content (unless it's H.264) should be no problem as long as the wifi works properly. There are people whose wifi work reliably with the Pandora, they would be able to do some actual testing.

 

[emcee]

I've done it through a usb ethernet adapter. GMPlayer still seemed to choke, but VLC worked fine.

 

[Fishbong]

If i use this wifi stick i have lying around, should i expect better results?

 

[Tom`]

I don't have a Pandora yet, but I wanted to add my experience here. It seems that SMB shares (whether on Windows or Linux hosts) give rather poor performance with VLC for me, no matter what settings I use.

This is over 802.11g wi-fi, mixed mode, router is Linksys WRT54GL, host connection is wired Ethernet and the client PC has a Ralink RTL8187 card in it. However, when I run a webserver on the host PC and tell VLC to stream over HTTP, it works well with few to no connection issues (depending on the video bitrate and network utilization).

I don't know what causes this, but it might be worth trying on the Pandora.

 

[paulguy]

I tried it with a USB stick and it worked quite well for ~640x480 divx. I was only watching the simpsons so it's not exactly taxing fast action material, but it's probably fine.

I used mplayer, it performed rather poorly unless I did -cache 8192. I think by default it keeps a very small cache when reading a file, but you can override it to get it to work properly.

 

[asimov-solensan]

This is one of the features I wanted most on the pandora, but sadly the wifi performance is too low. I guess it can work with low bitrate videos, but in my tests (using rpc) i obtained 150-250Kbps. And that's very far from the theorical 54Mbps.

I wanted to try witha USB stick with the rtl2750 chipset but the drivers are not on the actual kernel.

P.S.
There is another problem with the wifi, some people has mentioned on the forums. If you look at the iwconfig the bitrate is always 1Mps, but forcing it to 54Mbps /etc/network/interfaces doesen't seems to improve the performance.

 

[WizardStan]

There is another problem with the wifi, some people has mentioned on the forums. If you look at the iwconfig the bitrate is always 1Mps, but forcing it to 54Mbps /etc/network/interfaces doesen't seems to improve the performance.

I've investigated this a bit.
The 1Mbps seems to be a "power saving" feature that can't be turned off. As the network goes idle, it drops the speed to 1Mbps, but as soon it gets busy it starts bumping up the speed. Try downloading a large file and then look at iwconfig in another window while it's still downloading: it should be at a more reasonable bitrate. Mine typically goes to about 24Mbps now, sometimes hitting 36, even so I still only get about 300KB/s which is about the theoretical maximum transfer of a 6Mbps connection. I've tried forcing it to be 54Mbps with the iwconfig rate command, but when I do that I get bursts of 600KB/s followed by lows of 100KB/s, averaging out to about 300KB/s anyway.
Anywho, some users are able to hit 900KB/s, which is about what I would expect from this chip, and what I think we'll all eventually be able to get just as soon as we figure out what the differences are. We need someone with a good 600-900KB/s connection and someone with a bad <100KB/s connection to try each other's routers. If the good suddenly goes bad and the bad one gets better, we'll know it's some router incompatibility to fix. If the bad remains bad and the good remains good, it means it's probably a problem with the Pandora itself.

 

[electrocity]

I am now starting to think this is not solely a driver issue, but rather a hardware problem. As WizardStan says, some people are getting good throughput of 900KB/s, other's aren't. I can't see this being a router incompatibilty issue as they all work to the same standard, and besides, I don't have any wifi issues with other devices.
I am half tempted to open up my Pandora and look at the wifi section, inparticular the resistance at various points.

 

[Prometheus]

I can't see this being a router incompatibilty issue as they all work to the same standard

I think you would be surprised...

 

[electrocity]

I can't see this being a router incompatibilty issue as they all work to the same standard

I think you would be surprised...

Yeah, but the Pandora is the only problem device I have encountered, ever, with any router.
Any router should work with the Pandora. I've never had any speed issues with any router I've used with a whole host of other devices.

That's what standards are for. The fact many people seem to be having problems with speed suggests it is indeed a Pandora problem.

 

[electrocity]

I've got the Pandora open now. I'm going to remove a couple of fixed resistors and stick a few variable resistors (pots) in their place, watching measurements all the time on the multimeters as I don't want to over-do anything current or voltage-wise.
I'm going to have a look through the junk box for suitable pots. I firmly believe there to be an impedance problem.
Might get this hooked up tonight for testing.

 

[jdbye]

I tried streaming from a samba share, apart from the video stopping every second to buffer it played properly - so, once the wifi speed is improved streaming from samba shares should be no problem

 

[Fishbong]

Let's hope the wifi gets fixed then. Thanks for your input.