Synology DSM 4.3

[Hawkwind]

Thanks Gaffer, will try when I get home and play around with it. VideoStation is definitely installed Works great with iOS already, using DS Video App from the iStore. Just need to sort out the windows client side. Hopefully I can figure that out tonight

 

[DaGaffer]

To be honest the best use I've got out of it is on the Smart TV. Its immediately rendered my Raspberry Pi with XBMC redundant, and actually made the dlna on the Samsung useful for the first time. I still prefer the XBMC UI, but VideoStation is good enough

 

[soze]

I have upgraded but Video Station is still not up for replacing my XBMC. I was hoping that when I browsed the NAS via the DLNA player I would get movies ect there so I did not need the Smart Phone App. We have 5 smart TV's in the house and on 3 of them when you send it to the TV the App just spins and nothing happens.

 

[Hawkwind]

Still trying, found that the browser based player is not as efficient as streaming into VLC on the Win 8 Tablets. The browser has some pauses occasionally missed packets causing picture blocks to be missed. Only very occasionally but still an annoyance and not acceptable. The DS Video app on IOS works perfect.

Will run some further tests as neighbors WiFi appears to be causing some interference issues in some areas of the ground floor. I probably need to re-install a repeater down there. Either that or look for a better router than the Netgear 3700. It is a year or so old, might upgrade it and make that the repeater on ground floor. Going to take a scanner home from work to see what channels he is using.

 

[Embattle]

Just use the Inssider app which is a simple app to scan the local area - http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/

 

[Hawkwind]

Thanks for the link, will try it out but I have access to one of these from work. The software is good and gives all the info I need. Price not that different from the Metageek solution with the dBX dongle. The advantage being it covers the GSM specs as well. We put WiFi and GSM on planes so have all the tests equipment

 

[Embattle]

Yes but to find channels I think the free bit of software is probably enough

 

[Hawkwind]

Point taken, it is overkill But if it is his wifi that is causing issue I would also like to know the power levels within our property.

 

[Hawkwind]

Yes but to find channels I think the free bit of software is probably enough

The mofo next door was basically taking up Ch 1-8 of the 2.4 GHz channels. I moved my 2.4 up to 10 +/- 2. The 5 GHz was not an issue. His router must be located close to the wall of our kitchen as the RSSI was was in the 60-70 range.

I've ordered two of these bad boys after reading the reviews:

Asus RT-AC66U 802.11ac Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit Router


Supposed to have one of the best ranges on 5GHz and also easy to setup a second unit in "Media bridge mode". Should help with some areas downstairs and give better throughput to the mobile devices/TV for the

 

[Embattle]

In my house due to its location I can detect 15+ other networks, so I just let the router pick one and if I have problems I shift to another channel manually. I actually have that router, it is good although a recent firmware slightly weakened the wireless strength after Netgear complained that Asus was outside the FCC limits. I've ordered a http://www.delock.de/produkte/F_701_Antennen_88447/merkmale.html to replace the middle antenna to give a little more strength in a certain area of the house.

 

[Hawkwind]

In my house due to its location I can detect 15+ other networks, so I just let the router pick one and if I have problems I shift to another channel manually. I actually have that router, it is good although a recent firmware slightly weakened the wireless strength after Netgear complained that Asus was outside the FCC limits. I've ordered a http://www.delock.de/produkte/F_701_Antennen_88447/merkmale.html to replace the middle antenna to give a little more strength in a certain area of the house.

I have some decent antennas i can use if those supplied are not good enough - do you know what version they did the update to reduce the pwr output? Or if that was only US models under FCC rules?

 

[Embattle]

It was a few firmware versions ago, since the there have been many updates performance, function and security it wouldn't be wise to try and use it any way. There is still the ability to change output power on both 2.4 and 5ghz bands within certain limits but in all honesty that isn't actually the best thing to always do and doesn't always result in better performance.

 

[Hawkwind]

Thanks for the feedback, they should arrive tomorrow. I'll just fit new higher gain antenna on them both. Do some tests and see how it goes.

 

[Embattle]

I've got some TP link ones but they only technically support 2.4 so I went back to the originals and they work well enough.

 

[Embattle]

Oh and the best forum for the Asus router I've found is http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/forumdisplay.php?f=37 which includes a section for Merlins customised firmware.

 

[TdC]

I feel your pain. Living in the inner city as I do there are scads of wifi signals around me. I basically made do with the best I can for lappy and phone and use powerlines for the main PC. Using powerline may be worth looking at Hawkwind.

 

[Hawkwind]

All sorted, the two Asus Routers installed one upstairs and one down. All rooms test for multiple HD video streams and checked the coverage/wireless power levels. Wow I luv these lil beauties. Very simple setup with the second unit as a repeater. I could probably lower the 2.4 power levels which are set at 140/200 but think I'll leave as is for now. Upgraded the Antennas on the router upstairs, just amazed at the difference. Great Router!

 

[Embattle]

Generally 2.4 won't go above 100 no matter what figure you stick in there.

 

[Hawkwind]

Didn't take any measurements of the signal strength but can do that at the weekend. Using the geek app the signal looks good all over the house. First time we have had decent wifi in the kitchen. Wife is very please as she can now listen to the Internet Radio whilst slaving away in there

 

[Embattle]

Took a chance on a Roku 3 to replace my WD TV, it has its own Video Station channel that works with the recent 4.3 DSM release.

 

[smurkin]

All sorted, the two Asus Routers installed one upstairs and one down. All rooms test for multiple HD video streams and checked the coverage/wireless power levels. Wow I luv these lil beauties. Very simple setup with the second unit as a repeater. I could probably lower the 2.4 power levels which are set at 140/200 but think I'll leave as is for now. Upgraded the Antennas on the router upstairs, just amazed at the difference. Great Router!

Thats interesting. When you say HD, do you mean blue ray or something smaller? Did you measure the transfer speed?

I tried endlessly to have my fairly shite wireless n plusnet router stream blue ray. I managed to get it up to about 3-5 MBytes/susing wireless 2.5 - but not enough for blue ray. Last week, I bought two inexpensive Gb 500mbps buffalo home plugs. After quite some faffing (swapping plugs and routing cat6 ribbon cable around the DS 212 room, can you believe ). I can now stream blue ray across the house enabling me to resite the DS212 next to the router (and not in the TV room). It will stream at about 10-12 MBytes/s for single large files from the DS. The bottleneck now is the shite plusnet routter which is 10/100 Mbit/s . So I plan to install a Gb switch for the internal network to raise its overall bandwidth. I would have preferred to do all of this wirelessly.

 

[smurkin]

Took a chance on a Roku 3 to replace my WD TV, it has its own Video Station channel that works with the recent 4.3 DSM release.

Can the Roku play back 1080p movies on a LAN? I would love to get rid of the PC in the lounge.

 

[Embattle]

Can the Roku play back 1080p movies on a LAN? I would love to get rid of the PC in the lounge.

I originally had an extra hub in my room to share my LAN connection with a Sonos device and the WD TV but since we added more Sonos devices in the house which would use a wireless connection I decided to make mine wireless as well and in turn it made sense to not use a hub for one device so the WD TV became wireless, this means my Roku 3 that replaced the WD TV is now also wireless with the added advantage of being dual-band.

I find it has no problem playing my high quality (10+ Mbps) Blu-ray rips but a few niggles exist to do with how you encoded your video and how you stream them. As to encoding the best way is to follow the guide on http://roku.yt1300.com/index.html but the gist is MP4/M4V using H.264 codec and AAC audio codec. Now regarding the streaming side Synology does have a video station channel on the Roku but for some reason it causes some stuttering in the video when used and has been reported by others as an issue, so it'll probably get fixed eventually. Plex doesn't however suffer any issues so once you've set it up on Synology and you've installed the Plex channel you'll want to make sure you do something very basic in making sure you select Direct Play to stop Plex trying to transcode, Direct Play will work fine if your videos use the previously stated file parameters.

 

[smurkin]

Ahh...my blu rays aren't compressed. I keep them as they come ripped from the disk. I am running out of space so I'm gonna try that handbrake link.

 

[Embattle]

It can support MKVs but whether the Roku could handle them totally uncompressed I wouldn't know but personally I don't see a massive difference in the actual quality with the right compression settings.

 

[Hawkwind]

Thats interesting. When you say HD, do you mean blue ray or something smaller? Did you measure the transfer speed?

I tried endlessly to have my fairly shite wireless n plusnet router stream blue ray. I managed to get it up to about 3-5 MBytes/susing wireless 2.5 - but not enough for blue ray. Last week, I bought two inexpensive Gb 500mbps buffalo home plugs. After quite some faffing (swapping plugs and routing cat6 ribbon cable around the DS 212 room, can you believe ). I can now stream blue ray across the house enabling me to resite the DS212 next to the router (and not in the TV room). It will stream at about 10-12 MBytes/s for single large files from the DS. The bottleneck now is the shite plusnet routter which is 10/100 Mbit/s . So I plan to install a Gb switch for the internal network to raise its overall bandwidth. I would have preferred to do all of this wirelessly.

I encode sources like Blu Ray to 720p MPEG 4 or Matroska with AC3 Audio. If it's material I really like - big movies I encode to 1080p. I've tested with up to 6 x 720 feeds running on different devices around the house 1 wired on lan and rest wifi. 720p video encodes at roughly 5000 Kbps. Audio at 48 Kbps. Willtry to get some figures on the transfer speeds when I get some time at weekend.