SMB constantly buffering, can’t get it to work reliably

[chrismec]

Hello, I’m at my wit’s end. I recently softmodded my 4.3U Wii and I’ve been using WiiMC 1.1.1 for my video and audio streaming. The problem I’m having is a common one, apparently, where the video I’m streaming from my PC to the Wii will constantly pause and buffer, sometimes hanging and forcing me to restart my Wii. I’ve searched through the forums here and done almost everything reasonable that I’ve found and I just don’t know what else to do!

It’s not a single video that freezes while buffering, it’s all of them. I’m trying to watch 350 MB / ~50 min videos at 980 Kbps, I know the Wii is getting good signal because all the laptops in my living room are. I’ve enabled “Everyone” file permissions for my shares (Win XP Pro sp2), I’ve set my router to wireless g mode only and set static IPs for both my computer and Wii. I use Comodo firewall and I’m not getting any interference from it, and I disable all filesharing on the PC before trying to stream.

I must be doing something wrong. I’ve read about people streaming 2+ hour movies to their Wii. Whaaaaat?? I can’t go more than 15 or 20 minutes without “Buffering (1…2….3…)” appearing. I’ve tried 30% to 100% cache, always drop frames, etc etc and I can’t make it work. Sometimes WiiMC can’t even see my SMB share and I get an error initializing the network. I really enjoy the look of WiiMC and appreciate the hard work put into it but I just can’t use it like this. If anyone reading this knows what I’m doing wrong, please let me know.

These are what I read, and none of them seemed to offer a solution that worked.
Trouble connecting to network – but only sometimes
SMB freezing (Just a coincidence?)
Video Over SMB
Buffering Problems 1.0.6
Anyone that is having problems with smb freezing

Btw, the router is a Linksys WRT54g running the Hyperwrt 2.1b1 + Thibor15c firmware.

[cadbusca]

Open Windows Task Manager/Networkung and watch the bytes sent/unit(sec) to see if it gives you an indication of when/why the data transfer is stopping. Something must be interfering with your data transfer.

[rodries]

You could be getting wireless interference. You could try changing to a different wifi channel. Or a more permanent solution would be to get a USB ethernet adapter.

[chrismec]

Well, this could be promising. I just watched an entire episode of Deadwood with only 1 pause for buffering and it filled quickly. I did two things differently- one was disabled filtering of multicast in the router, and two was force the transmit speed to 54 Mbps. I took jhb50’s advice (router was already on an unoccupied channel) and left network stats open while SMB streaming. I noticed that the wifi connection speed was jumping a lot; 54, 48, 36 etc and it seemed to coincide with spikes of network dropping on the utilization graph. So I forced the router to 54 Mbps transmit mode and only had that one instance of buffering.

It was probably just a coincident, but here’s hoping.

One other thing, I thought I read that while the video was paused, it would continue to load? In my cause, the network activity dropped to 0%. Is that normal behavior Tantric?

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