Choppy play of video files from server

[lyle677]

I've been using my Boxee Box for well over a year now with great success! Until now. I typically stream movies from my server to the Boxee Box. Suddenly, this week I am seeing chopply playback, lot's of delays, and typically half way through the movie it freezes completely. I have made NO CHANGES to my setup in over 6 months!

Netflix continues to work flawlessly and if I put the movie on a USB stick and plug that into the back of the BB, that also works flawlessly. The video files can also be called up without problems on any of my other computers that are also hooked up to the network.

The BB is hardwired to a DLink Powerline device that is fed from a DLink router. My server is using FreeNAS 8.0.

I have tried resetting completely to default settings. I have removed, re-installed, and re-scanned my "sources". Finding and scanning the SMB shares worked fine. It is just the playback that's not working. WTF??

Please help! We have become hopelessly dependent on our Boxee and we are quickly going into withdrawal.

[pjk]

Did you add any electrical devices to the power grid to which the Powerline device is connected? Maybe there is now electrical interference on the power grid which limits the available bandwidth on the powerline network (due to increased packets having to be resend because of the interference).

Could you connect a laptop (or other PC) to the network connection you now use for the Boxee Box and do some transfer rate tests to see if the network has slowed down?

[lyle677]

Thanks alot for the suggestion. To my knowledge there is no new electrical device plugged into the grid. However, I moved the PowerLine device from one outlet to another outlet and everything is up and running again!

Why didn't I think of that before? Duh!

It begs the question, is there anyway for me to test and improve my PowerLine thruputs? Can anyone suggest any device, software, weblinks, etc to help me improve this? I would love to hardwire my Boxee Box, but alas it's just not in the cards....

-Lyle