Hi folks. Just moved into my new house. Got the house wired by a professional network engineer (in his spare time). All of the cat 6 was terminated and tested correctly. Below is a basic outline of my network. I tried to watch an MKV on the streaming box downstairs and it struggled. Sound was perfect, picture stuttered every couple of seconds. It was barely noticeable to the boss, but I noticed more. Tried it on the streaming box upstairs and it was better (still stuttery but less so). Tried it on my PC and it played flawlessly. AVIs appear to work just fine on everything. The MKV wasn't big at all. A couple of gig. My network engineer friend will come and test the network again this week, but I have a sneaking suspicion that because I skimped on the switches. I'm aware that the Cat 6E cables aren't a "real" standard, but they're fairly well made and I didn't have the will to make a dozen of my own cables up. 100 Mbit/s should be sufficient anyway for HD streaming. What else is out there which is more capable/reliable/better for a SOHO/Media type setup? Need a couple of 8 ports and a 5 port. Unmanaged is fine (maybe). So, what are your recommendations as far as switches go? Thanks in advance!
I'd go with switches as well as they're budget ones (so won't be able to do the full bandwidth they should). Although it'd be worth swapping the patch cables to Cat5 first. There's a tiny difference in the pin spacing between Cat5 & Cat6 and this can effect connectivity. Is it only single runs to each room? This'll limit each room to 1Gb. A better solution is to put a better switch centrally and wire each device back to it.
In my house I have a somewhat similar setup. The central "hub" switch is a 1gbit Linksys switch with 24 ports and all of the switches around the house are these D-Link green switches. I get 1gbit connectivity to all of my devices and have never had a problem with files lagging and such. Is the audio encoding in your MKV movie in the DTS format? I have experienced that both Samsung TV's and most streaming boxes cannot decode DTS properly and this causes slowdowns.
that would be the case though if you had lots of devices connected to one of your dlink green switches all trying to pull big data from a source connected to another one of the green switches somewhere else or the central switch. Ultimately connecting switches around means that all the devices linked to that switch are going to share the 1gbps connection back to the central switch. so is not a problem for devices connected to the same switch, but could be for devices connected to any of the other smaller switches. Careful using the word hub, as hub's are real, and they are real bad
Ah yeah, true - hubs are the devils spawn. Looking at OP's diagram there shouldn't be any heavy hitters on a shared switch. Unless the Sky boxes receive their signal through the ethernet jacks and not through a seperate coaxial cable? The maximum bit rate of a blu ray movie is in the 40-50mbits, so in theory there is a 950 mbit overhead for the other devices connected to the switches. OP: Have you tried playing another type of media? Something that isn't MKV encoded, but .AVI for instance, with an easily edible audio codec?
There are double runs to each room (for redundancy sake). But only 1 is connected at any time. "Although it'd be worth swapping the patch cables to Cat5 first." Did you mean to say Cat 6? There's only one Cat 5e on the network and that's just to my vodafone box. I believed that Cat 6E was the same as Cat 6. Cat 6E I'll try various other files and see how they perform. Do you have any other recommendations for switches? Which brands etc?
What's your budget? Most modern branded switches should be fine with Cat6 however cheaper models can have an issue due to the lower manufacturing standards (hence the try it with Cat5 first just in case as it's a £2 test if you haven't got any spare cables). If you've got dual feeds to each room you could try putting the streaming boxes on their own feeds to check it's not a problem with the local switch. This will help determine the next step.
Probably £50 ish per switch I'd be "happy" with. I'll try the suggestion. I'll just move my NAS downstairs and plug into the cheap switch to test it out. Then direct. Probably easier!
pffft lightweight. I have 3760x at my house.... haha if only. I have a dell powerconnect. yours Is a nice switch, I hope your house is grateful.
I use several TRENDnet TEG-S80G Unmanaged 10/100/1000Mbps 8-Port Gigabit GREENnet Switch with .mkvs, and they work great. As a bonus, Newegg often has them on sale for $19.99 USD. Although I am streaming to an PC running Windows 8 with XBMC and two WDTV boxes instead of directly to any TVs. I'm also streaming from a proper WHS 2011 box with an i3, so that may help.
Your problem is not in the network gear, but more likely an issue with the encode (try something else??) or with the WDTV Live. I know my WDTV live can't (quite) handle the 20mbit/s 1080p planet earth stuff, but other than that, it's mostly 5+ year old rips that were done really poorly that it won't play. Also make sure you're not using Jumbo frames on any of the computers.
