Powerline Networking

[daveon]

Anybody have any experience of this or advice?

I've moved the media to the 500GB HDD networked downstairs, but I've found that the avi files play perfectly but the DVD files are pushing the limits of the wireless connection.  It's been suggested that I try powerline networking which should give me a wired connection that will handle DVD and even HD-DVD levels of throughput without any trouble.  It's not a particuarly cheap solution, $200(ish), so before I spring for the network equipment I wanted to see if anybody had any experience of this?

The alternative that's been suggested is upgrading the house to 802.11N, but that would involve dismantling at least one PC and I can't be arsed and it would cost the same.  Plus I've a decent 802.11G router anyway.

Thoughts?

Comments

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

Yes; I'm using the Devolo dLan 200AV - it's clearly the best piece of kit out there. The good points are : it just works (on UK 240V, house is 5 years old).

Throughput on some extremely unscientific tests leaves SMB transfers at about 21Mb/s, somewhat low on a '200Mb' device. Detected carrier rate is about 140-160Mb. I've not tried raw IP/etc throughput yet, or any form of tuning.

Even so, that's clearly enough for DVD as that tops out at 10Mb/s and is rarely encoded at that bitrate.

There are indications that the Homeplug AV standard may cope with noise a little better than homeplug 1.0/Turbo. One thing that is definitely true is that whilst Homeplug AV (200Mb) coexists with Homeplug 1.0 (14Mb)/Turbo (85Mb) it does so by impacting heavily on performance.

My configuration is probably inefficient, but at the moment it's basically just connecting a router to a PC. It does that with no hassle at all. You'll get a rock solid connection with above wireless speed, but I'm not sure it's likely to worry a cabled connection.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Great, thanks...

I'll run over to Circuit City at lunch tomorrow and see what they've got. They do sell a "noise cancelling" module too which plugs into the power supply and cleans it up.

I'll get the 200MBS unit and see what happens. I've a HD file I use for tests which is 1.8GB for a 22minute segment of TV. That pretty much tops out the WiFi connection, so that's exercise this nicely.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

Noooo! Don't clean the supply up - it'll kill the bandwidth!

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Can you do an ethernet drop - we ran 100Mbps into the lounge for the media centre, and 1Gbps around the office. The faster the better, I say :-)

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

make sure it's on plugs in the wall and not extension leads as I found this dropped the bandwidth massively; don't know how surge protectors would affect it.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'd already heard about having to use the wall socket, so I'm going to have to get some more decent power strips with surge protection.

I'd love to be able to do Ethernet, but they didn't wire the apartment that way and it's not my place sadly.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I've been using the Netgear XE104 without problems. As syllopsium has said elsewhere, the actual data transfer rate is considerably lower than the published rate (85Mb/s for the XE104), but it's still better than the abysmal performance I get from 802.11g in the same situation.