One of the very major decision that I made for my home network was to centralize the data tier in a NAS, the objective that it can provide me reliable stoarge accessible on any device, anytime and possibly from within anywhere inside and outside the home network. It could be expanded based on need without having to upgrade the access devices. The data centralized can include:
(1) Data rlevent to computers (Windows, Linux or Mac)
(2) Music
(3) Movies, Documentaries, DVDs, CDs, etc
(4) Our Photographs and Videos shot through digital cameras/camcoders/smartphones
(5) Books, Important papers, documents etc.
(6) Anything else
For video, one key access device is the STB streamer serving the Television. In my case I already have invested in an AC Ryan PlayOn! Mini 2 (without HD) for my little daughterto watch her bursery rhymes, animations films and TV series. It also has done a perfect job with any .MKV, .Avi, .ts that we have thrown at it. I find this cheaper than an HTPC.
One key issue i faced with the streamer is whther to connect it to the router using WiFi or Wired Connection. In my present temporary residence, I do not have a wired network in place and hence I am forced to use WiFi. I faced many issues:
(1) First the number of dongles supported is very few (Realtek based 802.11n draft version only). ACRyan does not maintain a HCL for dongles and offically support only their dongles (ACR-WN10001 and ACR-WN10002). To be one the safe side, I decided to buy the official ACRyan dongle (ACR-WN10002). It would be a logical decision for most
(2) The problem with ACRyan dongles is that they support only 802.11n and the 2.4GHz frequency band. The 2.4 Ghz band suffers from interference from other networks in the aprtment effecting the throughput. Even though rated at 300Mbps downlink and 150 Mbps downlink, I am able to connect at a speed of only around 20 Mbps MAX with any 802.11n or 802.11ac router. I have no g or AC clients on the network. My other 5 ghz 802.11n clients like PCs connect at a solid 450 Mbps to these routers, but the ACRyan dongle is stuck at only 20 Mbps. ACRyan does not seem to make a 802.11n dongle that supports the 5 GHz band. This poses two problems:
(a) Some high bit rate 1080p movies won't play properly at times and their is frame choppinness.
(b) When i forward or rewind, the progress is very slow even though i am forwarding at 16X/32X. The feature is practically unusable.
It could be the draft-n driver in the streamer or the interference (likely) on 2.4 ghz bands. I generally observed that the access bandwidth of 5 ghz clients are twice or higher than 2.4 ghz clients on PC. And all these devices are in the living room within a 5m radius from the router.
However, to my surprise, these two problems are solved if I connect the streamer STB to the router using a LAN cable or play from a USB connected disk. I am forced to think that if I had 450 Mbps 3-antenna 802.11n client working on 5 GHZ band, then atleast my access speed would have been much higher and I could have avoided these two issues. Right now I have no solution on WiFi for the Mini 2. This is a direct feedback to the folks at AC Ryan for their next series or future firmware/dongle-device upgrades for the Mini 2 streamer. Better build the fastest WLAN connectivity into the device or supported dongle and perhaps reserve space to upgrade to future technology driver.
A warning to other People buying streamers without disks or intending to stream content from a file server need to care about the bandwidth between the data source and streamer. An excellent streamer (ACRyan PlayOn! mini 2) somewhat let down by sub-standard wifi connectivity ...
UPDATE: One possible solution for such problems due to poor network connectivity could be the use of a small memory (say 32 GB or so plugged on the USB port) as a frame buffer cache. Some CPU cycles could be used to copy part (even 100%) of the data to the disk at the beginning, while the player starts playing from disk, part of the CPU cycles are used to continue the copying to that temporary storage. the amount of the data to be copied could be based on the gap between the required streaming bandwidth for the file and the actual (10% anyways to account for Wifi connectivity issues). This might overcome the frame choppiness in most cases.
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