Massive stutter in video playback over LAN

[obeseotron]

I have a small LAN in my apartment with two roomates, I have one NIC connected to that LAN and the other connected to the cable modem. Originally we had a really old 10Mbit hub and we were having problems with stuttering in videos shared over the network. Given a data rate of around 1Mbit for the video, I didn't think that it was a bandwidth problem but because they're so cheap I grabbed a 100Mbit switch in the hopes that it would solve this. Well, it didn't, we're still having huge problems with stuttering. I tried copying a video file to one of my roomate's computers and it displayed the same kind of stuttering pattern as the video playback. It goes along transfering a few megs a second and then drops down to below 100k/sec for 5 to 10 seconds at a time, speeds up and repeats. This is pretty much in line with how the video playback acts. What could be causing this?

 

[Zugzwang152]

did you make your network cables yourself, or are they machine made?

 

[obeseotron]

The one I'm using was handmade, possibly by me possibly not, a friend where i used to work borrowed it from their pile of cables. I'm starting to think it's the cable, but I don't have another 60 foot cable on hand to try and figure it out. Guess I'll have to move the computers next.

 

maybe the switch working badly, you can "ping" the othre PC to test the switch whether lost data packets.

 

[Zugzwang152]

Originally posted by: obeseotron
The one I'm using was handmade, possibly by me possibly not, a friend where i used to work borrowed it from their pile of cables. I'm starting to think it's the cable, but I don't have another 60 foot cable on hand to try and figure it out. Guess I'll have to move the computers next.

Instead of replacing the whole cable, try cutting off both ends and recrimping.

 

[Keitero]

After reading it and you did state that you moved from 10Mbps hub to a 100Mbps switch and still have the same problem, it does sound like the cable might be to blame. Zugzwang152 is right on that, you don't need to kill the whole cable, just cut the ends and recrimp.

 

[obeseotron]

Thanks for your help guys, but it turned out to be a windows driver issue, I updated them and restarted and it worked fine. It was the Realtek GigE port on my msi k8n neo2, strange, but it's fixed now so whatever.

 

[thriemus]

What are the machine specs (cpu, ram, HDD, video card) and if you are using windows media player to view the files up the buffer to at least 60 seconds of content in the options.

Failing that and easy way to rule out the cable without testers is to time how long it takes to copy a large file over the network and see what throughput you are getting. 10mbit is good for a realistic 700kbytes/sec and 100Mbit is good for the high 9.x MB/sec if you have good nics. Also if you are using the windows drivers for the nics (especially realtek 8139 & sis900 based nics) then update them to the manufactures drivers as there will be no hardware acceleration for them using windows drivers. These are mearly compability drivers to get you up and running. Windows update drivers are fine to use if you cant find the manufactures website easily.

Failing that its sounding like the cable. Also check that its wired properly. All pairs straight through will work 'ok' over short distances but not properly over longer distances as they need to be cabled properly for impediance using 586B wiring (white and orange, orange, white and green, blue, white and blue, green, white and brown, brown)

Failing that pull your hair out