A couple of years ago we bought a Popcorn Hour A100 in order to be able to play our digitized movies and without having to have a dedicated computer for this task. Now that we’ve moved we found ourselves in a position where we couldn’t avoid having a network cable lying across the floor in our living room.

Having had that cable there for almost three months finally pushed us over the ledge and we decided that something had to be done. Either the cable would have to be nailed to the wall all the way around the room or we would have to find a wireless solution. Looking at the room and the length of cable it would require I decided to have a look at what’s possible to do with WLan. =)

By the way, some of you might claim that the problem could be solved with adapters transmitting the network through the electrical circuits, but that’s already been tested in our household and it didn’t work for full HD 1080p media (actually it didn’t even work with a DVD rip).

Having checked around for the theoretical maximum bandwidth required for HD media I realized that a G network (54 Mbps maximum, theoretical, throughput) wouldn’t cut it. Instead I figured that the new N standard might be enough. Looking around the internet I came across this Linksys ethernet bridge and decided that it looked interesting. But considering the increase in Apple computers we had already considered purchasing an Apple Airport Express in order to ensure that the wireless access point and the Apple computers would have the best possible circumstances to achieve the maximum throughput available. So, would it be a wise decision to use a Linksys wireless device in conjunction with a Apple Airport Express and still expect maximum throughput? No, probably not. True, the wireless-N draft has now become a standard but that doesn’t mean that all different N-devices from different vendors immediately will receive a firmware update and begin to cooperate flawlessly from day one. So, given that Apple states that the Airport Express unit can also work as a network extender it became apparent that going the Airport-route would be the most efficient one. Apart from that – the difference in cost between the Linksys ethernet bridge and the Apple Airport Express is a mere $27.

Said and done – two Apple Airport Express devices were purchased and installed the same day as they arrived. The installation using my Windows Vista laptop was pretty straight forward apart from one thing. Although the Airport utility successfully found the first Airport, double-clicking it just gave me an error message stating that an error had occurred while reading it’s configuration. The solution here is to select ‘Configure other’ from the ‘File’-menu. Enter the IP-address of the device (which can be seen in the applications main screen) and also provide the default password (which is ‘public’) and there you go. I’m quite impressed by the amount work Apple has put into making the setup process end up with a proper configuration. As an example I was warned about the fact that the Airport Express had detected that it was probably performing double NAT (since it had been connected to our existing NATed network). One click on an OK-button and problem solved. Brilliant!

The other Airport Express had to be configured in the same way, just that this one would be set to extend the wireless network instead of creating one. This results in the ability to connect wired devices to the ethernet port of that Airport Express and thus making them wireless.

In my test I managed to transmit 70 Mbps from our NAS (Netgear ReadyNas NV+) to my Vista Laptop using CIFS over the wireless link. Quite impressive if you ask me. In the creation of the wireless network I chose to use the 5 GHz band only and in combination with WPA2. I might choose to activate 2,4 GHz later on, but that might reduce performance, so we’ll see.

While testing the performance of the Popcorn Hour using a full high definition movie (1080p) I noticed stuttering only once during a scene with a lot of fire and explosions. Switching the Popcorn Hour from CIFS (SMB) to NFS in its communication with the NAS seems to have solved this problem as well. It is a well known fact that the CIFS implementation on the Popcorn Hour might not be up to scratch, so uing NFS will more than likely give better performance. Which it did. =)

So all in all – I can recommend building a wireless bridge using Apple Airport Express devices for your HD media streaming needs. Of course, depending on how your house / apartment is built you might not have the same success as we’ve had. As an example I wasn’t able to create the network from within our wardrobe and retain the performance I needed – the wall is simply too thick for the 5 GHz network to go through fully.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 16:21 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.