Buying advice for NAS HD Streaming?

[bodean]

Is there any buying guides or advice on the form, to use with my Fire TV, to stream my 720/1080p movies over my NAS? 5GHZ is getting a lot of buffering.

 

[azazel1024]

What is your setup (router, location, obstacles)? What kind of content are you streaming (bit rate matters, not resolution)?

If you are looking at homeplug suggestions, most should be able to stream 1080p. You should really only need 15Mbps for decent streaming of most 1080p content (other than bluray). So something's gotta be going on if you are getting lots of buffering with 5GHz wireless (unless you've got a number of heavy users, or high attenuation).

 

[smagro]

The advantage of homeplugs for streaming video is stability rather than throughput in my experience.

I don't know what video player you are using on your FireTV but I find that XBMC or Plex are not very tolerant to interruptions. A momentary dropped signal is often enough to freeze/crash XBMC. The video cache/buffer is something XBMC devs have been playing around with for a long time but it's still not very satisfactory.

 

[thiggins]

Is there any buying guides or advice on the form, to use with my Fire TV, to stream my 720/1080p movies over my NAS? 5GHZ is getting a lot of buffering.

No buying guides. But give these articles a read.
HD Streaming Smackdown: The Rematch

Three Stream N For HD Streaming: Close, But No Cigar

They are dated and need to be redone (note to self). But they discuss many of the issues. The best thing you can do is the required bandwidth down. This means transcoding. Fortunately, there are NASes that can do this quite well now and on the fly.

 

[bodean]

What is your setup (router, location, obstacles)? What kind of content are you streaming (bit rate matters, not resolution)?

If you are looking at homeplug suggestions, most should be able to stream 1080p. You should really only need 15Mbps for decent streaming of most 1080p content (other than bluray). So something's gotta be going on if you are getting lots of buffering with 5GHz wireless (unless you've got a number of heavy users, or high attenuation).

1 floor condo. Router is in far bedroom, about 40-50 ft and a few walls from the Fire TV. Fire TV has XBMC on it, the file bitrates are 28.9 Mbps. Router is in my signature

 

[stevech]

HD1080p is OK with a good strong WiFi signal. But you and your neighbors will compete for unused air time on/near a WiFi channel.
Best to stream video on wire, except for Netflix and the like, as they reduce the data rate cleverly, to fool the eye.

HD1080i, I say, takes ethernet cable.

These are not NAS topics - they're LAN/.WiFi topics.

 

[azazel1024]

HD1080p is OK with a good strong WiFi signal. But you and your neighbors will compete for unused air time on/near a WiFi channel.
Best to stream video on wire, except for Netflix and the like, as they reduce the data rate cleverly, to fool the eye.

HD1080i, I say, takes ethernet cable.

These are not NAS topics - they're LAN/.WiFi topics.

All in the bit rate, distance to the router/AP, interference, etc. Most of my stuff is encoded at around 6Mbps for 720p and 9Mbps for 1080p (turning on ALL the options, so High Profile + to get encodes that tight and still be excellent quality. Downside is even with an i5-3570 running at 4GHz, I am only getting ~22fps on encodes for 720p and 6-8FPS for 1080p encodes, where as with looser encoding settings I can triple or more the encode speed, but either with poor visual quality or several times the file size).

Anyway, in my experience I have no issues streaming HD streams to an "unlimited" number of devices in my home without any of them breaking down. That was true with 11n and doubly true now with 11ac. Even off the same basestation I've tested with streaming 3 720p streams and 2 1080p stream and all of them worked fine (my phone, my wife's phone, my wife's ipad, my laptop and my tablet), that was when it was just an 11n N600 basestation. Granted, none of the devices was more than a couple of rooms away.

Never noticed any streaming issues in my house, but the worst location with my slowest 11n client in my house is still around 30Mbps (phone) and most of my clients can easily do 50-60Mbps in the worst location (or more).

Anyway, most/all AV500/600 clients should be able to easily do 30+Mbps within something like a single floor condo where the wiring distance might only be 60-100ft or so between powerline adapters. Probably want to still play around with outlet choice, if possible, but you should have pretty good success. You might even be able to get sufficient bit rate out of a AV200 powerline adapter kit, but I'd be a lot more leery of that with that kind of distance.

 

[starvinmarvin]

We can stream 3 HDTV signals at once over our Powerline setup. The equipment is:

SiliconDust HD Homerun Prime Digital Cable-card Tuner
CAT-5e ethernet cable 6-ft. length (supplied with HD HomerunPrime)
TP-Link WDR-3600 dual-band Gigabit router
CAT-6 ethernet cable 10-ft. length
Netgear Powerline AV 5001 500Mbps adapters (one in router room and the other 2 rooms away in living room).
Home theater PC with standard ethernet network jack, Windows Media Center and 1TB Western Digital "video" hard drive.

If you just need to stream one HD quality video at a time you can use a cheaper 200Mbps Powerline kit, but the 500Mbps kits have recently come down in price so you may as well take advantage of that. Netgear is OK and we also use TP-Link powerline adapters with no problems.

If you have any charging cables for your cellphone or iPad or any other charger/adapter keep it unplugged from the wall when not in use. Those charger cords can generate interference which degrades your signal over the powerline adapters.