BTV Link issues with mixed network (need help with test plan)

[nmirza]

The wireless network I have is based on an Apple Extreme Base Station. My BTV server is connected via ethernet to the Base Station, and my Desktop PC is connected via a DLink 802.11g PCI Card. I do have a total of 4 PC's and 2 Mac's that are on the network. I have been playing with the trial of Link, but I'm having the same issues with stuttering at a lot of others have complained about. I'm going to go a head and try to compile a list of all the hardware I have, and any level of success that I have with Link. Does anyone have any advice for tuning my BTV Server?

[jkoon]

Well I would suggest making sure that your desktop has a strong signal strength, also you might want to try recording at a lower quality and see if that helps any.

Personally, I have a fully wired network and I have experienced some stuttering issues. The stuttering I experience is from the BTV server being overworked. Namely if the cpu maxes out the playback on the link machine will stutter. Also if there is too much hard disk access it will cause link to stutter.

[Zogg]

What's your signal strength?

I have a USRobotics 802.11g router and if the link quality is on the upper end then Link works fine for me. If it drops down toward 11Mbps then it starts to stutter some.

Z

[nmirza]

Signal strength is pretty good, as I have an external antenna. The interesting thing is that there is almost NO network traffic. Sooooo, that means that I'm not saturating the network. I really think we are having problems with how BTV Link works with different types of hardware. I would try connecting directly via ethernet, but Link doesn't seem to work on my VAIO laptop (kicks back a D3D error, and dies).

I guess I'm really just going to wait for the next version of Link. Too buggy right now...

[flavius]

You should submit your error messages and a dxdiag file to snapstream support, if you haven't already.

[nmirza]

Well, I finally got a bit more of my testing done. Here is how everything plays out:

Test case 1: Link Client - Dlink 802.11G card connecting to Airport Extreme Base
BTV Server - Fast ethernet connecting to Airport Express Bridge
Max bandwidth - 54M (theoretical)
Result - LOTS OF STUTTER!
Test case 2: Link - Fast Ethernet connecting to Airport Extreme Base station
BTV Server - Same as above
Max Bandwidth - 54M (theoretical)
Result - Much less stuttering at first, but get's bad after the first few min...

In both cases, network utilization is near 5%. Now, if I had to bet some money on it, I'd say that there are two problems going on with Link.

Problem 1 - Doesn't seem to play nicely with some wireless cards (I've seen other posts with problems with Dlink).
Problem 2 - BTV server doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the stream in some cases. Since I've got 250BTV cards, generating the MPEG stream shouldn't be a problem. Getting a steady stream on the network seems to be the issue.

Snapstream support dudes, is there any test data you'd like to see? I could grab a network capture with Ethereal, if it would help.