Please try this if you have broadband and a router

[Len]

With the router connected, go to http://www.yahoo.com and find the "Broadcast Events" section of the page on the right side. Then click on a movie trailer (like Planet of the Apes) and try a 100 and 300 kbps video stream. Please tell me if the play back of the 300 kbps stream is smooth with no apparent dropped frames.

The reason I ask is that BEFORE I installed my new DLink DI-804 router I had WinME Internet Connection Sharing installed on a 2 PC network using a Linksys switch and I got smooth play back at 300 but WITH the router installed it is smooth at 100 but extremely choppy at 300. At 300 it seems to be dropping MOST of the frames. Looks more like a slide show really. I have Road Runner cable with nearly 2 Mbps download bandwidth so available bandwidth is certainly not the problem.

Please help me in determining if all routers degrade performance like this in certain cases.

 

[[Oc]acaridans]

I just tryed it at 100 and 300....didnt have any problems at all... Both settings were completly smooth and clear.
Ive to have Roadrunner and im behind a Linksys router.

 

[Len]

Thanks. What is the model number of your Linksys router?

 

[Hugo 59]

Smooth as a babys bottom. I have dsl 1.5 down and I'm behind a netgear rt314 gateway router.

 

[[Oc]acaridans]

Thanks. What is the model number of your Linksys router?

its.... BEFSR41

 

[sfa ok]

I play 300 kbps streams all the time behind my Netgear RT314 router with no problem.

 

[Len]

Is there anyone out there with a D-Link DI-804 that can try this?

 

[Len]

The Windows Media player plug in used for the Yahoo movies has a statistics option. At 300 kbps my average frame rate was 0.5 (yes, that's less than 1 fps!). Not surprising given that out of about 900 packets I dropped 150. When I tried it at 100 kbps I got 15 fps and 0 dropped packets. So far, this problem seems to only affect streaming video. If I download something I get my normal 1800+ kbps.

Do video streams use a special type of packet that my DI-804 is having trouble with? Is there something else which uses these same type of packets that I could try to see if other things are affected?

 

[Weazel]

I just ran it at 300 behind a dlink 704 and it was clean and clear

 

[Thelemac]

If your router uses a hub that might be the problem. It could be having massive collisions which makes you have to redownload the video.

 

[SpeeDj]

My D-link di-704 works just great too =)

J

 

[Len]

The DI-804 uses a 4 port switch not a hub.

This problem has been very difficult to track down. Over the weekend I spent a night trying to create a scenario which consistently reproduced the problem but I couldn't. I have 2 PCs on my network, a new AMD 1400 DDR system and an old K62-500 system. During my testing I sometimes got the 0.5 fps performance on the fast PC, sometimes on the slow PC, sometimes both and sometimes neither. Sometimes a reboot of the affected PC made the problem go away and sometimes it didn't. Recently, I have not been to reproduce it all. It seems almost random at times. I just can't figure it out.

I still can't tell if its router related or not. I tried a few tests without the router and each PC (alternating between the two) connected through my 10/100 Linksys switch but I was never able to reproduce the problem.

I think I need to install Real Player and try some higher bandwidth video streams. I found some site (which I just can't find right now) which had movie clips (like The Abyss) in several bit rates going way up to 5 Mbps! I'd like to try a 1.0 or 1.5 Mbps video to see how it works. I'll post the site if I ever find it again. If I don't lose packets with a video stream that fast then either the router is fine or the problem is intermittent.