Streaming Movies and Music

[Strat6]

Hi all,

I was looking at NAS units, some of the ones reviewed here and I need clarification on a couple of things. Myself and my GF own laptops and they are our main computers, so storage is an issue.

1: Can I connect Wirelessly to the NAS unit?

2: If there are video files on the NAS unit can I just double click them from my browser and they will stream to my laptop?

If this unit can't do it is there anything I Should be looking into that can? Basically I want to keep all the movies I have on one HDD and if it could be wirelessly accessed and streamed from by both our laptops it would be awesome.

[Babrbarossa]

Yeah- you can do that.

TERASTATION PRO II 2.0TB NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE - DirectCanada if you're feeling rich

Buffalo Linkstation Pro 250GB NAS Network Shared Storage Centre Gigabit LAN - DirectCanada if you're on a budget

[Strat6]

Wow I have been doing some research on these NAS devices and a lot of them seem to have problems with streaming video.

I have a wireless router/modem so would this basically perform the same function hooked up with an RJ45 cable to the router?

Comstar 500GB USB External Hard Drive With RJ-45 Network Connection

Future Shop: Computer Add-Ons: Hard Drives: Comstar 500GB USB External Hard Drive With RJ-45 Network Connection - Web Only

Hope that link works. It's about 120 bucks, so that would be a good deal methinks.

[Babrbarossa]

Man that's cheap!

[Strat6]

Ha, so I guess you think this would be a good idea and a reasonable alternative to a NAS?

[lcdguy]

what you need to do is see what kind of bandwidth usage your getting when streaming from the device to your media centre box. Also it depends if your movies are uncompressed iso or ts folders or compressed divx/xvid etc. I have had bad experiences my self with stand alone nas's for streaming movies. I have a Intel SS4000E with 4x sata drives and gigabit ether net and it would jitter. I have had to settle on using an additional PC with a ton of hd space and stream it. It still jitters every now and then but is much better than the NAS. Also i do want to change over to a complete gigabit network.

Here is the problem with uncompressed movies.

you average trans rate over 10/100 is probably in the neighborhood of 8-10.5 MBPS. while this is more than enough for a standard DVD if it were to dip down to say 3-4 MBPS that is to low and it stutters. If having absolutely flawless playback is critical either install a ton of drives in your pc or in your HTPC. Music is a non issue as it doesn't use anywhere near as much bandwidth as a movie. If you are viewing compressed video files such as divx/xvid or even h.264 it should work fine.