Not sure if this is in the right area...but I am having a really hard time understanding why the following is happening.
I encode all of my movies to H.264 AAC with an mp4 wrapper and I use an average bit rate of 1024kbps. This rate does show some artifacts in some of the animation movies for my children so I've recently started trying to up that bitrate. My network consists of a gig-e card in my media server, a Netgear WNDR3700 router with a gig-e switch and dual-band wireless-N, and I'm streaming to a DMA2100 via wireless with 300kbps. My DMA2100 states that my reception is great and HD streaming should be no problem. I'm using Win7 WMC. I've verified transfer speeds to other computers is successfully reaching the 200 - 300 Mbps speeds.
I use Cars as a test because the opening sequence seems to cause the trouble I'm experiencing consistently and is usually a good indicator that other movies at some point will also have playback issues. I tried bumping my bitrate up to 2500kbps and in the opening sequence the video slows down to half speed and the seems a little jumpy. If I pause the movie and the press play, it clears up the issue but if the movie is still in a part that would give me trouble anyway, the problem will begin immediately, if the movie is in a part that usually won't cause the slow down, then it will play normally until it reaches a problem area.
I've checked my uploads graphs while playing the movie as well as my CPU and RAM utilization and nothing seems to be bogged down. My network never goes above 4500kbps, CPU is at 30 - 40% and less that 60% RAM utilization when this happens. If I lower my bitrate back down to 1024kbps...it plays fine. I've also verified the source plays fine on the local machine.
I do not understand what is causing the issue with the movie playback. I hope someone can point me in the right direction.
Thanks
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/54976/249765.aspx#249765
sadly it looks like they never did figure out the h.264 issue, or why the linksys stutters on a fairly low bitrate. This post was also pre-Win7 WMC so I'm wondering if anything has changed. The final synopsis I'm taking away from the above post is to convert to .mov and it should be fine...now I have to find out how the file size compares to .mp4.
Thanks for the link
by the way...I tried the above and the file size for storage and the quality just doesn't compare to a .mp4, therefore this is not a realistic option. It would be just as well copying the TS folder structure to the hard drive and saving without any compression. The only thing I can attribute this issue to is the fact that the DMA2100 does not support AAC w/ H.264, only "Audio: MPEG-1 Layers I & II, MPEG-2 Layer I & II, AC-3 (No divx support)". So I can only guess that it is having issues with the audio and that is resulting in less than optimal performance on playback.