Hey all, first time poster. Hopefully you all can help me out. My home has recently been networked with cat 6 cable which if i understand correctly has the cability to stream high quality video. I want to buy some sort of media server that i can can put in my office, upload all of my dvds to, and then stream them to different televisions throughout my home. I am sure i will have to buy an decoder or something to attach to all of my tvs so that my television can read the signal. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your time!

CAT6 is the RJ45 cable type that supports up to gigabit (1000mbps) speed. Cat5e and Cat6 support this however all other hardware including the switch, network card has to support it too to run at gigabit speeds.

All fixed networks 10/100/1000 are practically much faster than wireless b/g/n draft thus even on a 10/100 your mom should be able to stream videos from the server.

As far as storage servers, I'd recommend the DLInk DNS-323 network box. You also need different network media streamers hooked up to the television to make this work. Popcorn Hour A110 network media box is popular, as is the upcoming Xtreamer. There are others but I cannot tell you about that.

You can set all this up and it will work but you need:
1) Gigabit Switch ($80)
2) DNS-323 DLink ($130)
3) Two hard drives for the file server ($150)
4) Network media streamer ($140-$240/unit)

Let me know if you have any questions.

I agree with Pred02. You need to make sure all your devices are gigabit (router/switches/network cards). And of course make sure you use Cat5e or Cat6 patch cables and not Cat5.

I currently use an HP MediaSmart Server (I have 8.5TB of HDD spcae) to store and stream all my media though my house to various extenders (SageTV HD200, Popcorn Hour, and 2 HTPCs). Teh HP MSS also serves to backup all the computers in my house, allows for remote access, as well as various other functions. I stream movies movies (HD and SD).

While the above is all true, it no secret that in a gigabit network gigabit speeds are never reached. Tests have shown that disk i/o quickly becomes the bottleneck. Knowing this the choice of a NAS (and more particular its disk performance) becomes very important. You will want to particularly look into the performance of the raid controllers used.

Cat6 (and now cat7) cabling comes in different flavours. The reason why these are better suited for high speed networks has primarily to do with the fact the cables have been designed to be less prone to external interference (shielding) and interference (cross talk) between the cable pairs making them suited for time critical traffic such as VoIp and Video.

Additionally you could put in place bandwidth improvement techniques such as LACP (link aggregation) to further optimize your network performance.

Bottom line, network intensive traffic such as streaming video requires a well thought design in order to get the best experience. Throwing together gigabit capable devices might not cut it ;)

I'm personally quite happy with my Windows Home Server (HP Media Smart in my case).

Just to confirm though, Cat5e or Cat6 (even not running at max performance) should be more then sufficient to handle HD content. I have never had issues playing any of my content back from my MSS. I upgraded to Cat5e/Cat6 about a year ago (My house only had cat5 which could not handle my HD content).

[QUOTE=ghislain;16753524] Tests have shown that disk i/o quickly becomes the bottleneck. Knowing this the choice of a NAS (and more particular its disk performance) becomes very important. You will want to particularly look into the performance of the raid controllers used.

Thanks all for the help so far, but someone is going to have to the above to me. What kind of disc performance should i be looking for? thanks again

Thanks all for the help so far, but someone is going to have to the above to me. What kind of disc performance should i be looking for? thanks again

I don't think you should worry about disk performance. ghislain was just pointing out that disk speed will affect network speed and the reason why many people never achieve max performance. For HD streaming on a Cat5e/Cat6 network max performance is not necessary. Just grab one of the Western Digital GP drives and you will be fine (I have 8 of them in my server setup and never have had an issue). I know many others who use the GP drives in their setups as well.

For those wanting to know more, this article makes an interesting read:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gigabit-ethernet-bandwidth,2321-7.html ;)

Just to confirm though, Cat5e or Cat6 (even not running at max performance) should be more then sufficient to handle HD content. I have never had issues playing any of my content back from my MSS. I upgraded to Cat5e/Cat6 about a year ago (My house only had cat5 which could not handle my HD content).

Yes, even 100mbps should be sufficient. B/G is not sufficient and n-draft is a hit or a miss depending on your network connection, signal. Wired over wireless for HD streaming is highly recommended if you can implement it.

Thanks all for the help so far, but someone is going to have to the above to me. What kind of disc performance should i be looking for? thanks again

My DNS-323 has throughput of apporximately 16-24mb/sec. I was able to achieve a bit higher speeds with home built File Server however these speeds come into play when copying large files versus streaming. If streaming externally (i.e. via internet connection) it is not likely you will achieve these speeds anyhow. To make the point clear, it is unlikely that you 100mbps or Gigabit network will be constraining factor.