Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > July > 01 > Entry
Multi-room DVR streaming action
When we built our home in late 2004, I had a home theater guy come out and do all the wiring. He added a few power outlets, wired most of the rooms for Ethernet and ran speaker wire for in-ceiling speakers and for our patio (which we never ended up using).
One of the big mistakes I made, besides not putting Ethernet connections in all the bedrooms, was to let a mistake pass: in the living room, where so many of our A/V connections would be, he put in a phone jack instead of an Ethernet jack. We’ve only had a home phone for one of the five years we’ve lived in our house and that stupid little port has caused me grief ever since.
At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal. At the time, Wi-Fi was an exciting, wonderful new technology. I was convinced that in two or three years, nobody would even need Ethernet cable or connections anymore. I began to think that even wiring the home for Ethernet might have been an unnecessary expense.
Now it’s 2010 and wireless has gotten faster and better, but it’s still not perfect, especially now that HD video is involved.
For the last few years, I’ve been using various wireless bridges to get my Xbox 360 online in my living room (our wireless-N router is upstairs in the home office), and to get our two DirecTV DVR boxes online. This allows the DVRs to download video on demand programming, do some light Web widgets (which are so clunky I don’t really use them) and to stream DVR recordings to my PC upstairs using software called DirecTV2PC.
That’s when things started becoming a problem. Watching recordings upstairs was fine in standard definition, but high-definition shows were unwatchable. They stuttered and stopped. The wireless connection wasn’t fast enough to transmit the video and audio and as more HD channels rolled out and more of our DVR recordings were HD, it became pretty unusable.
My router is wireless-N and the Ethernet bridge I was using in my living room, a wireless-N Apple Airport Express, still weren’t fast enough. My router is set to mixed mode, however — it doesn’t push out the fastest form of wireless-N because to set it that way would disable Wi-Fi devices in the home that use wireless-G or wireless-B (like our Nintendo Wii, for instance). I could buy a dual-band wireless-N router that might solve the problem, but it was still no guarantee I’d get speeds fast enough for HD video and would require more setup than my lazy self was willing to experiment with.
The other problem in our home was that with two DVRs (living room, master bedroom), we were always recording stuff on one DVR and then finding that we couldn’t watch it in the other room. I ended up wasting hard drive space double-recording many programs on both DVRs since I was never sure whether we’d be watching shows in the living room or in bed at night. It was particularly frustrating that I could stream recordings to a PC, but not from one DVR to the other.
Then, this summer DirecTV rolled out Whole Home DVR, a feature similar to what U-verse offers. With one DVR (and some separate non-DVR receivers) you can watch recordings in any room.
I was less interested in that than in the ability to link up the two DVRs and combine my DVR playlist, watching them from either room. I signed up for the $3-a-month service and tried it out.
Stuttering. Stopping. The wireless network was again too slow.
I called DirecTV and they told me it would cost $150 for a technician to come out and install special hardware that would link up the DVRs on their own little network over the existing satellite cabling and assure speeds fast enough to make the streaming work.
Unfortunately, while the DVRs would be all set up, it wouldn’t do anything for any Blu-ray players, the Xbox or other devices that could use a wired connection in our home theater.
I decided instead to buy some powerline adapters instead. I’d had luck with a set of adapters I’d tried out a few years ago. I shopped on Amazon and found some Netgear adapters that included a base station (which plugs in upstairs to our router) and a four-port switch adapter that would go in our living room cabinet.
I bought an extra four-port adapter for our bedroom. The whole set-up cost a little over $200.
A few days later, the gear arrived and I plugged the adapters directly into power outlets (and not into any power strips, per the instructions). The adapters found each other, transmitting data through our home’s electrical wiring.
And… it worked! Once I had both DVRs connected, they recognized each other and our programs merged into one long playlist. Programs are marked “LIVING ROOM” or “MASTER BEDROOM” and although there’s a small delay as a program loads from another room, the video looks great and there’s no more stuttering.
Occasionally one of the DVRs will drop from the network, then return quickly. I’ve noticed that the bedroom adapter seems to have a slower connection than the living room (based on indicator lights on the adapters), but the speeds haven’t dropped enough to affect viewing HD video. I haven’t hooked up any computers to test speeds (frankly, I’m afraid to mess with it now that everything is working). The Xbox recognized the network instantly with no set-up, as did the DVRs and our Blu-ray player.
Netflix streaming on the Xbox and Blu-ray player work fine, too.
It’s not the perfect solution. It’s not even the most elegant solution — there’s still cables and adapters I have to keep hidden from view. But it worked for about the same price I would have paid DirecTV to install a less useful solution.
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Comments
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By Richard Scheffrin
July 1, 2010 9:53 PM | Link to this
I'd like to say that the Powerline solution was my idea, but I'm not Microsoft. I'm going to give the same setup a try and see if I have the same success streaming HD media from a Windows Media Center to the kids PC.