Love the Olympics... just can't stream it using my Wi-Fi

Forums › LAN (ethernet/Wifi/routers/Bluetooth) › Love the Olympics... just can't stream it using my Wi-Fi

manhinli

2483 posts

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#25370 19-Aug-2008 19:57

I love watching the Kiwis perform to their best at the Olympics - streaming over 40GB of it this month alone!

I recently bought myself a Wi-Fi adapter to attach to my Wi-Fi dead laptop (to move around the house to use the Internet everywhere)

Tried to watch the Olympics streams over my Wi-Fi network - buffer takes ages and only plays for around 2 seconds at a time.

Obviously using the wired solution - it works fine.

Did Speedtests right now:

4080kbps - Wi-Fi with 99% signal
5529kbps - Wired

... so it starts to get strange. Obviously the streams are only 700kbps so 4mbps should be fine!

Anyone got ideas on fixing this?

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iainw

75 posts

Master Geek

#158223 20-Aug-2008 08:54

What else have you got running in the background? That 4080kbps is shared between every application on your laptop using the internet - it doesn't necessarily mean that 700kbps is available for your stream.

Does your wireless access point support WMM/QoS? The other likely cause of problems is your latency. Depending on how big your buffer is, if it takes too long for the data to get to your laptop, the buffer is empty before the next packet arrives.

Try pinging the video server from your laptop when it is wired, and then when it is wireless and see if there is any real difference.

manhinli

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#158422 20-Aug-2008 17:26

The pings were around 20ms off my wired connection.

Other things like YouTube and the like load as usual - so streaming seems to be the only one out - which is strange.

I will now try out WMM on my WRT54G and see how it goes.

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manhinli

2483 posts

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#158437 20-Aug-2008 18:30

Well, no improvement at all - still buffers like mad.

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