Time Capsule streaming flawless?

[Bilalo]

Hello

I wanted to ask, If I have blu ray movies and say all my itunes media so songs, tv shows, movies and etc on the time capsule, does it stream flawlessly on my macbook pro or is the wireless speed too slow to stream a blu ray movie directly from the time capsule on my laptop? Can 2-3 diff laptops stream at the same time from my time capsule and wud it still be flawless or really good?

 

[priitv8]

I don't see how a TC could stream anything to your Mac in the first place. All it can do is network file copy. How that affects the playback, is completely up to the application used for playback. For example, Apple TV is so good at buffering the stream ahead, that network bottleneck is almost eliminated. Sure, if your movie bitrate is so high, that aTV buffer underruns, you will get stutter on playback also there.
If you know the transfer rate of TC (bps) and your movie's bitrate, you can calculate how long it will take to copy 1 sec of a movie from TC to your Mac. If it will take more than 1 second, you will not be able to achieve smooth playback.
I'm sure, the throughput figures for TC must be available on the net.

 

[opinio]

Black magic shows the following for the speed test on the internal drive of a current Time Capsule. I am running a 4TB 7200rpm internal but I see no reason why it would be different to the OEM 2 or 3TB. Clearly the bottle neck is not the HDD anyway.

I get the same result on WiFi or Gigabit ethernet.

I'm not sure what you mean by streaming in relation to the TC, but if you mean can you play a video file on a Mac when the file is located on the internal drive in a TC I don't see why not when you look at the speed test. They are similar to USB2.0 speeds for read and write.

 

[silvershamrock]

I have my primary iTunes library on an external drive attached to my TC at the moment. But before I got the external drive, my iTunes media were all saved on the TC itself, and I streamed the content to my MBA.

I wouldn't exactly describe it as "flawless" although it was generally good. (It worked flawlessly about 98% of the time, but if I was trying to watch a movie while TM was trying to do a backup, I noticed a little buffering from time to time. Also, iTunes takes longer to boot up when it's accessing the media files on wifi, and when you start playing a new media file there is a short lag (maybe a few seconds, long enough to be noticeable but not long enough to be annoying).

It was still a lot easier than having to remember to plug in my portable drive (which was my first storage solution) whenever I wanted to open iTunes.

I haven't tried streaming to two different computers simultaneously but based on my experience with trying to stream media while TM is uploading a backup, I don't think that would work very well. However, I've found it to be a satisfactory solution for a single computer.