Hey everyone,

  I'm wondering if anyone is using the Windows Media Player 12 remote access feature to view their pictures from outside the home? I set it up yesterday with minimal problems, but the bandwidth seems to be a huge issue. This seems pretty obvious moving around 3-4MB pictures over the 'net. I wanted to know if anyone has any tips on how to better use this feature? I was thinking of finding a program to create a mirror picture library to cut down on the bandwidth requirements.. any suggestions?

Thanks!

-Jonathan

Hi Jonathan:

When I first tested this last year, I saw some sluggishness when both ends were WiFi connected, and one of them was on a shaky network. I really put it through its paces this past weekend when we had to take the kiddos out of town for a wedding. Our hotel had a wireless-G wifi solution in place, and my Media Center at home is wired, and the kids were able to stream their recorded shows all weekend without issues. I was truly impressed by the experience. For TV/music, I know WMP is supposed to adjust the quality of the stream based on available bandwidth, but am not sure how that impacts picture viewing. How was you experience with other types of media?

Pete

Hi Pete,

  Thanks for making me re-visit this post because after some thinking, I went back and looked up the details of my internet service. I thought my upstream was 768K on DSL. My neighbor, who graciously let me log into his network for testing, was on a 10-12 megabit connection so I knew it wasn't on his end. I finally found out that my upstream was 384K! That must have been the issue. It was the first time loading up the library from a remote site and it was being served up at a very slow speed. That being said, I made some changes this morning and am now on Comcast (it gives me a bad taste in my mouth to say that but....) I am working with an advertised 2Mb upload speed, however...  I went to speedtest.net and tested the two services one after another over Wifi (on my laptop with a G card) and these are my results:

DSL:       2.52Mbps up/0.29Mbps down
CABLE:  14.14Mbps up/3.56Mbps down

  I am pretty happy with this (of course!) and the timing is pretty good because I'm going to Portland this weekend and I will be able to test this feature properly! I am actually very excited to see how well the airports do as well as the home I will be staying in. I'll report back next week to let you know how it went.

 Until then!

   -Jonathan