Actiontec MI424WR - a cheap MoCA bridge for all! - Page 31

Something I know from my experience having a box like that (but the splitter is no way as 'nice' as that one) from Comcast my Moto Moca boxes don't allow me to stream blu-ray from upstairs to down and I attribute it to not the Moca but the device I'm trying to send the BD feed from does not support 1GB ethernet. So all your devices and internet boxes on the network must be able to support 1GB.

Guys,

I'm at a loss here! Essentially I've tried everything suggested; everything I could think - I've got the Networking working - and there's no cable cut outs or any such problems - but I just can't get streaming Blu-ray working!!

Phill: I did as you suggested. Got rid of the Diplexer in the middle and connected the MoCA Adapter the way I had the Diplexer connected. Networking worked fine and there were no TV cut outs or anything. I also got the Family Room & the Master Bedroom on one 2-way splitter.

Wryker: I agree; all devices need to support Gigabit Ethernet. I actually went through each device ... from the network adapters in my HTPC, to the Cable Modem, to the Vonage Adapter, to the Dune Smart D1 Media Player. There isn't a single device in my setup that doesn't have a Gigabit Ethernet port; there is no device which cannot support 1gbps connection.

I don't understand why so many other people (Over at the Dune Smart D1 forum) who are using the exact same MoCA Adapters ... some of them with old & complex cable wiring, worse then mine, are able to stream Blu-ray without any problems & I cannot.

I'm getting the EXACT SAME results, in terms of networking & bandwidth, with these MoCA Adapters that I got from my D-Link 500mbps Powerline Adapters. There is absolutely no difference in the speed/networking performance between the two. I could get networking established and I was able to stream MKV, M2TS and other HD media up to 20mbps bit rate with no problem. But I just can't seem to get stutter-free playback on a full Blu-ray ISO.

---

I have a question. Is there any way to for me to test the MoCA Adapter connection manually, OUT of my setup. Let me explain what I mean.

I've pulled the MoCA Adapters out of my setup. What I want to do is connect the MoCA Adapters manually with a Coaxial Cable ... directly one-to-one ... have my HTPC on one Adapter and my Dune Smart D1 on the other and see if I can stream Blu-ray that way. Essentially I want to start identifying what could be in my setup that's causing the network degredation. I want to start with the absolute bare minimum.

Can I do this somehow?

Thanks.

Unless its MOCA 2.0, you're not even going to max out a 100Mbit connection. What are the stream requirements for a full Blu iso?

I've even gone so far as to run an ethernet cable directly from my router upstairs all the way to the moca downstairs and BD streaming will stutter and then stop. My multi-ethernet switch is not 1GB speed and thus no BD streaming.

Then its a bandwidth issue. MoCA 1.0 is about equal to a 100MBit connection, so if your actual 100MBit doesn't work, MoCA will never work either.

The Actiontec Rev. I's (MoCA 2.0) can be had occasionally on ebay for about $130 a piece. That WILL work then...

The reason I bought the Netgear MCAB1001 is because there's quite a few people who are using these exact adapters to stream Blu-ray ... stutter-free & flawlessly. So my MoCA Adapters are not the issue; nor is the Dune Smart D1 which, again, a lot of people use to stream Blu-ray to.

I've also managed to speak to people who have cable wiring much, much older to my home and are streaming Blu-ray painlessly over MoCA.

I know it's not the adapters, the cable wiring, or the media player. One thing I'm looking at right now is my HTPC itself ... the source. I have a Gigabyte Motherboard which has an onboard Realtek NIC Card. It's a Gigabit NIC card with a Gigabit board ... but I did manage to find some threads right here at AVS where some people were not able to stream Blu-ray because of the onboard Realtek NIC card. They switched it out with an Intel PCIe NIC Card and their problems were solved. That could be my issue. If the NIC card in my HTPC is not capable of delivering the correct bandwidth/data ... then all this MoCA and Powerline and everything else is m00t. So I'm looking at that right now.

Interesting. I thought I had read that here. Ooops.

If you read through the Oppo BD-93 thread, you'll see lots of discussion of alternative formats for streaming BD content from a computer. While ISO streaming (a bit-for-bit copy of the disk) is the gold standard, it is being forced out of existence by the studios, which have mandated firmware updates to end that capability. However, there are other methods that have lower-quality sound (I don't know about video quality, as my only streamer is a Roku, and everything I watch with it comes from one of its publicly-available channels).

Perhaps the folks who are streaming BD content are first compressing it to fit within the capabilities of MoCA and powerline?

BTW, I went with MoCA not because it is inherently faster than powerline but because it operates in an environment free from the noise introduced into AC wiring by the motors common in mulitple appliances used in homes.

No, I stream full bit-rate Blu-rays (ripped with AnyDVD+ClownBD) over Moca with no issues. Once in a blue moon I get a little hiccup but I blame that on my underpowered file server.

Phil,

These guys are streaming uncompressed, untouched ISO's ... usually 42GB in size and usually a bit-for-bit copy of the BD. I don't want to consider a format switch because the HTPC sits in the Family Room where I have my entire big screen TV, Reciever/Speaker setup. That is the "primary" home theater in my house and Blu-ray's are played right off the HTPC ... no streaming, networking involved. The master bedroom where I have the Dune, where I'm trying to stream Blu-ray to, is a "Secondary" priority when it comes to media playback. I wouldn't want to touch the quality or compress audio or video in any way in the interest of streaming media to my bedroom.

Incidentally ... this "secondary" room where you want to watch the same media off the "primary" location is pretty much the main reason that these guys in the Dune forum went with MoCA in order to be able to stream Blu-ray to their secondary rooms from the main Home Theater room.

I know the capability exists; I know MoCA can stream Blu-ray. I do believe there is some bottleneck in my setup that's causing the problem. I'm going to start at the barebones ... connect the HTPC to the Dune directly using MoCA ... a one-to-one LAN connection. And start from there. With no cable wiring, splitters or even cable signals in the way ... if that works, then problem lies elsewhere. If it doesn't ... then it's my HTPC or the MoCA Adapters itself.

I'll just have to start at the minimum and add things one by one to determine what's the bottleneck.

Scott -- what kind of a device are you serving Blu-rays from? WHS, HTPC, what kind of NIC card, etc? Thanks!!

Lucky you guys! I can only stream DVDs from PC.

A home-built NAS on an Intel Atom board with Intel LAN chips on mobo, running FreeBSD (though I wish I'd used Linux). It has two Ethernet ports; one is connected via GbE to my desktop PC, and the other is connected via 100Mb to the Moca router (Actiontec rev A). I bridge the two ports together in the OS.

You might try using only 100Mb Ethernet to see if that makes any difference. It seems to help for some people with stuttering issues. You probably wouldn't want to leave it like that but it would be interesting to know if it helps.

Thanks.

I did a small test connecting my HTPC to my Laptop w/ TMT5 directly .. LAN-to-LAN ... no moca, no internet, no coax, no routers, no modems, nothing! Just my HTPC directly connected to my Laptop via LAN. The Blu-ray did NOT work!!! I had the EXACT SAME stuttering and playback issue that I did over MoCA or Powerline.

I'm 90% convinced it's the NIC in my HTPC at this point. There is no reason that there should have been any performance issues playing Blu-ray over direct LAN between the HTPC & my laptop. I think I need to replace the onboard Realtek NIC in my HTPC with an Intel PCIe GB NIC.

Just to exclude the obvious:

Have you tried more than one Ethernet cable?
Have you checked for updated NIC drivers?
Updated chipset drivers?

(And I seriously doubt these would be an issue but...) how fast is the hard drive and has it been defragged?

fly --

Sometimes it is the small things; the ones we overlook and never give our attention to that cause the biggest of problems. So good call!

Yes, I tried a couple different cables to make sure.
Yes, updated to the latest NIC drivers. Incidentally I did find some threads on across the web where people using the exact same NIC card as me have failed to stream Blu-ray; and upgrading to an Intel PCIe NIC solved it for them.
Yes, I have an almost OCD-habit of keeping drivers, software, chipsets etc. updated.

The hard drive - it's not SSD - but as far as I know SSD is not a requirement to stream Blu-ray; most people I know stream Blu-ray with HDD's. That said, the Drive is a Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. I can't state with certainty that it's been recently defragged - and I can certainly defrag it - but I do have little faith that will resolve the issue.

Thanks!!

Yeah, I've never really seen defrag do ANYTHING for performance. And my only concern about the drive was maybe that it was some old 5400RPM drive with an 8MB cache. And even then it would probably still work, I dunno. Either way, it seems you've eliminated everything but the NIC.

Do you have another PC that you could try to stream from?

After years of using the Norton Speed Disk because it was much faster than MS defragger, I found Diskeeper, which leaves Norton in the dust when run manually, and runs continuously in the background to keep fragmentation down in the first place. It's not free but it's not very expensive either. It does keep my relatively ancient pc running well.

But it does sound like the problem is the NIC.

I too had an HTPC (atom-based board with a Realtek NIC) for some HTPC stuff a while ago and found it just didn't have the chops to move video effectively over the network. It handled local media OK (not great) but not when played from the network. And this was with a direct gigE connection into a gigE switch with just the gigE connected fileserver on it. I narrowed it all down to the poor throughput on the motherboard. I gave up on it and moved to using a different system (relegating the atom setup elsewhere). Mine was a mini ITX setup so my options for adding things to it were limited.

As for NICs, I refuse to use Realtek-based setups. I'll pay extra to avoid them. They have failed to live up to providing networking for anything other than bare-bones web surfing. Once you start pushing them they have impossible to debug problems. The most direct solution is to just disable the Realtek and use an Intel-based NIC instead.

Actually, yes. I have an Alienware notebook with an Intel Gigabit NIC card -- I'm actually thinking about ripping one of my Blu-rays to the notebook and streaming to the Dune to test! It should be a good test because the notebook does have an Intel NIC ... the sort that has been suggested for the HTPC.


Phil - I'll look at Diskeeper; not necassarily for this particular issue, but for general defrag performance. If it runs in the background though - would it intefere with the HTPC performance, say, while watching a movie or something?

Thanks!

Diskeeper's background mode only does work when the machine is idle.

I have a question but first a little background. I have FiOS and I'm running a MoCA bridge for a PS3. The main router from Verizon is a Rev. F and the other with the PS3 is a Rev. D. I have connectivity and everything is working fine except i can't download and install demos of any kind. After exhausting every effort to troubleshoot the PS3 I brought in a friend's PS3 that was working fine and his did the same thing. Sony seems to think that its a router or network problem at this point. They say I'm losing packets or they are becoming corrupted somehow. Has anyone experienced this or have any idea what settings may have changed on these newer Actiontec routers? Losing hope here because it's been ongoing for three months and i'm afraid to buy any new games because any needed updates or addons won't install I'm sure. Thanks for any and all help.

Do these devices support GigE? Every GigE device I have has issues negotiating a stable Ethernet connection with both my Actiontec's and NIM100's.. they both seem to be able to support only Fast Ethernet (100Mpbs). Is this a limitation of these devices?

If I use 100Mbps ports, connectivity is great - I know the devices themselves only support up to 100, but if a 1000 device is hooked up to either, shouldn't it negotiate to the lowest speed??

Has anyone gotten these to work together on a MOCA network?

I have a few of each, but cannot get them to talk because the channels these use do not overlap.

1424 (Rev A) uses Channels 1-6 and the NIM's use 15-20 - how do you get them talking to one another if you cannot overlap the channels??

If I go straight MOCA NIMs it works, or straight 1424's but I cannot mix them without issues.

Guess only the higher 1424 Rev's support the higher channels??

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Correction: Diskeeper only does deframentation when the machine is idle, but when a file is written, it will try to have the write done in a way to avoid creating fragmentation.

But when you're simply playing something on disk, you're not doing any writes, so Diskeeper should stay out of the way.

Are diplexers 'known' to crap out if you ever go to switch out the cables? Last time I disconnected my diplexer when comcast was here it stopped the signal going through (on my moca boxes one flashing light means it's sending a signal; albeit weak) and I'm re-doing all the cables in my room and the same thing happened. No more signal so no more internet downstairs. VERY piXXing me off. That's 2 Aspen D2200 diplexers no longer working. Is Aspen a crappy brand? I need to get this resolved quickly since there are many devices connected downstairs that will no longer.

I haven't had any diplexers die on me just because I'm swapping coax.. the cables can be unplugged just like any other splitter.. at least for me, I haven't had any issues after moving the cables around on my diplexers bought off EB.

I wonder if it's the Aspen brand that 'fails' like this. What brand do you have/use?