I recently had the opportunity to play with a pair of Netcomm homeplug networking devices. The idea was to use some of them to eliminate the two long cat6 cables in the house, of which one crosses a high traffic area (kitchen and passageway), the other just runs around the wall out of the way. Unfortunately for me, despite being labelled 200Mbps and being told I’d get real world 80Mbps I actually saw closer to 15Mbps. Yep, that slow. A single pair of devices on a single power circuit and doing a single large file copy through them sat on 15% of a 100Mbps link. The tool for the devices clearly indicating 170/143Mbps (TX/RX). And my house was built in the last 5 years by some most likely unqualified teenagers… but that’s another story.

At first I thought maybe it was my netbook being crap, over wireless it gets 31%/54Mbps (16Mbps), so that sounds fair, but then I tried the cable, and well 85Mbps blew that theory out of the water fast. So at least for me, it seems that my equipment is capable of 85Mbps and putting the homeplug devices inline reduces that to 15Mbps. Shocking.

But in the spirit of still trying what I started, I put the homeplug devices in place for the theatre’s needs, after all thats only running 100meg now. Then I looked at the average bitrate needed to play various 1080p x264 files, and most were around 6-8Mbit, so that was promising. However, that was 3 second averages I was watching, so it was still possible for spikes in bandwidth required for high action scenes. In theory buffering should take care of that, but we know the WDTV lacks decent buffering (it does assume local storage after all) and most PC applications that are decent lack buffer options (vlc has them, but fails at the decent bit). Previousy I worked on needing 75+Mbps for smooth playback, which was a stick your finger in the air and take a guess figure, and with the usb nic on the wdtv it all played back smooth. With the homeplug it started out fine, and I plugged the netbook in on that side of the network to drag more data over concurrently, hopefully giving me a rough idea on the throughput being used for the playback (15 – what I’m getting = what it’s using. Very complex). It was fine until, as expected, a high action scene and then the video started chunking up and my transfer had already hit 0bytes/sec several seconds before the first thunk. So basically unusable for 1080P, despite being the NP201AV edition. AV = audio video? Yeah right.

This was also ignoring the general incompetence of their installer/software cd. Ok I have 1 windows PC, a netbook, with no cdrom. I copy the contents of the cd to my nas using my linux box. I try to run it from there, I get an error, I copy it locally and try, same error. I copy it to the root of a drive and I get the same error. It couldn’t find some file, of course not naming the file doesn’t help. I considered making an iso of it but I didn’t have any iso mounting tools on the netbook and didn’t want to bog it down with more rarely used drivers. So I proceed to hang a usb cdrom off it, just to install a configuration tool. That worked.

Oh but it doesn’t end there, the installer COPIES the dotnet framework installer to it’s directory. Yep, despite it already being installed, it copies the installer over to my hard drive, and not one installer, three. The normal 1.1 installer and both x86 and x64 builds of 2.0. Obviously they’re planning for my PC to magically reboot into XP64. Fortunately disk space isn’t at a premium, but this totally unnecessary extra 100meg isn’t warranted for a 1500kb configuration tool. If you considered that both 1.1 and 2.0 were already present (along with full visual studio 2005), and my cpu (N280) is totally incapable of running 64 bit code, it’s a waste.