web sharing - slow. help?

[motulist]

I have web sharing on so I can stream all the media on my computer's hard drive to my ipod touch. It works, but the speed performance is pretty terrible. I'm just streaming videos over my local wifi network (not through the net) and the playback buffer on my ipod touch will take a while to start, then there'll be a burst where the buffer starts moving forward reasonably quickly, then it'll suddenly completely stop adding more to the buffer, wait a little while, and then suddenly start adding more into the buffer.

What's up with this? I'm running this on my own wifi network at home, it should be blazing. In fact, I actually get much better streaming speeds into my ipod touch when I actually do watch a video I'm streaming from some other website on the net.

How do I make my Mac's web sharing stream faster?

 

[bmcgonag]

I'm not sure why that is happening, but I can tell you, that for 2.99 in the app store, AirVideo is more than worth the money. I use it to stream video from my iMac media servers to my iPad. I love it. I tried a couple of the others that people mention, but there was a lot of jittery-ness with them...AirVideo is very smooth, plays tons of formats, and can convert if needed on the fly.

Sorry I couldn't help with the original problem, but you can test the free version of AirVideo on a few files to see if you like it.

 

[motulist]

Thanks, but I tried that program already, but it doesn't run on PPC machines, which is what's acting as my home server.

I really want to solve this problem. I'm pretty sure it's a new-ish problem too, because for a couple of weeks I was streaming songs using this same web sharing setup without any problem. But now it seems to be getting worse and worse. Now occasionally songs will just stop streaming altogether and never recover. Looking at Activity Monitor on my mac and watching the Network tab, when I first click on a song on my ipod touch I'll see my mac's "data sent/sec" values look like this

(in KB/sec)

300
2
0
0
0
0
130
70
50
1
30
50
50
0
0
11
10
15
0
0
0
0
225
0
0
0
10
2
0
0
150
140
170
0
0
0
0
0
300
250
275
0
0
0
0
0
0
0





What the heck is happening here?! How do I fix this?!

 

[bmcgonag]

Sorry that it doesn't work with PPC. I don't know of any other ways to do it. As for your network issue, often times on networks and then internet, a burst at the onset of upload or download will be seen, then a throttling back will occur. If this has just begun recently, and everything appeared to work before, you might try just vacuuming out the air vents on your router, and making sure that it isn't overheating. Sounds crazy, but it works a lot of the time.

Also, check your Quality of Service settings in the router, and make sure that you are giving priority to your web sharing ports and applications.

Wish I had more to try and help.

 

[motulist]

I fixed the problem. Well, I identified the problem and have temporarily fixed it, but only for the moment. The problem was/is my wifi router. During my troubleshooting I tried turning it on and off again at least a couple of times to see if that fixed the problem, but it didn't. Yesterday I wound up turning it on and off again for an unrelated issue, and when it came back on this time, suddenly I'm able to stream a constant 600 to 250 KB/s, just like it's SUPPOSED to be.

So its fixed for the moment until the wifi router decides to get crippled again without being fixable by restarts. And this router is basically brand new, it's only about 5 months old.

To anyone who might be reading this - NEVER BUY A NETGEAR ROUTER!