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Wireless multi-room sharing

I have three DVR's, one hard wired, one powerline, and one wireless. The hardwired and powerline can see each other and share no problem. The wireless cannot get internet access.

Question: since I am using WEP security, wouldn't I need to input the password to enable the wireless DVR to access my home network? If so, I have a problem because I cannot locate a place to input the password. Or, will wireless sharing be available only for open (unencrypted) networks?

Responses

midiwall

Tutor

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8 Messages

15 years ago

Cool, thanks. I'm remoted into my machine at home from work, so if they're not truly using italics fonts to show the issue, then it may not be coming back across the VNC connection. I'll come in directly and try again.

I searched around (before I posted even! :)) and found the "l o o p" fun. dang..

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midiwall

Tutor

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8 Messages

15 years ago

(looks like describing what a vacuum does (s u c k s) is a bad word. {is lousy} works though)

I fired up MRV at home this morning, got the stuttering, and started wandering the forum and fired up a protocol analyzer. 30 seconds with an analyzer can show a lot. 🙂 The issues with MRV on wireless has nothing to do with _wireless_. It has a LOT to do with (what I see as) a real poor implementation of streaming.

The echo on the forum seems to be "wireless {is lousy}; DTV won't support it at release; run CAT5". That's a silly bandaid around a design issue. The issue here is that what DTV is doing with MRV is VERY ACK/NAK chatty, and that's a poor design of a feature.

"ACK/NAK" doesn't fit with wireless (for high bandwidth applications like streaming) because of the propagation delay. I suspect DTV is depending on the CPU in the "server" DVR to handle the transport controls of PAUSE/REW/FFW and they wanted to provide a quick user experience. That's not how to handle streaming, because it requires... an ACK/NAK heavy interface.

The right way to do this is to put the onus of transport controls on the client side, and implement a FIFO buffer managed by a thread on the client. If someone wants to FF past the end of the buffer, then you stop the buffer thread, do the math for the seek, and seek on the server, and restart the buffer. It's not rocket science, it's old-school buffering.

I figure that once the DTV "engineers" saw the issue on wireless, they just figured that the easiest thing to do was to start a rumor about how wireless {is lousy} and let the community propagate it. That's very sad... Though it probably comes from them being under pressure from marketing to get this out. No one had the time to go back and fix it.

The easy fix here is to vastly increase the size of the buffer on the client side, that would buy their protocol time to handle the chatter with the server and stop the stuttering. But, memory is short on these boxes, and I'll bet they implemented this by feeding into the standard playback driver, which of course was designed to stream from a local harddrive.That would explain the stuttering, which comes from the buffer not being large enough to handle the delay in getting the data from the server.

fwiw, my two Roku N1000 video boxes have NO problem streaming 720p HD content across the same network that my DTV HR20's are on. This is not a problem with "wireless".

sigh... I had such high hopes for this, and (we all) waited so long for this...

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greywolf

Professor

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3.9K Messages

15 years ago

DirecTV is only going to support DECA for networking anyway though. They see a need to be able to support networking and that means having a single type of networking under their control. The programming would be specific to the strengths of DECA and involve no hardware changes. I think I got my first HR20 in August 2007 and it works fine in a hard wired network. Since all receivers will have a cable connection, using it for networking seems a logical step. I was afraid this forum was going to wind up becoming a network support forum just like the other forums that use networking and that is coming true. That demonstrates a real need for DECA.

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dcd

Expert

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20.7K Messages

15 years ago

midiwall, you made one glaring error in your analysis. You suggested the playback burden be shifted to the client rather than the server as Directv designed it. Your solution will absolutely not work. When the programming is streamed from a DVR to a receiver, the receiver has no playback abilities, so the burden must be on the server (the DVR).

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midiwall

Tutor

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8 Messages

15 years ago

@dcd;

Umm, I said that the "transport controls" should be the responsibility of the client, "playback" is a pretty broad term.

I'm unclear as to at what level you're saying the client doesn't have "playback abilities". Clearly the data from the server to the client isn't analog video 🙂 so it must be ("should" be) the raw MPEG4 data from the server. If so, then the interface on the client side should just be changing the data stream that the MPEG decoder is drawing from. Instead of local disk, it's a network source.

If the the driver is designed right, it shouldn't care where the data came from.

It's the same concept as connecting to a drive through a local IDE/SATA/SCSI connection versus SMB, NFS or Samba. It's all invisible to the application layer (in this case, the playback driver/MPG decoder), you map the drive, point to the file and say "go".

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bimmerdude

Tutor

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4 Messages

15 years ago

Here I am jumping for joy upon hearing Multi Room is being beta tested and I can be involved! Unfortunately my happiness is short lived because it doesn't work. 😞 I am using a wireless N network and my HR20 & HR22 are linked, they see each other's playlist and it looks as if it will work...but each DVR will not access each other's media. Totally bummed. MRV is what I've been waiting for but it looks like I need to wait a little longer. Any ideas, tips, etc. ??? Thanks!

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greywolf

Professor

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3.9K Messages

15 years ago

Red button resets and waiting may work. Otherwise, wait for DECA to be available.

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bimmerdude

Tutor

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4 Messages

15 years ago

Thanks, GW. I will give the resets a try and keep my fingers crossed. I would be disappointed if I'd need to wait to get a wired resolution. But at least this feature is just around the corner.

Thanks again!

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midiwall

Tutor

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8 Messages

15 years ago

Bimmer; I had the same issue, and either a soft reset (from the setup menu) or a hard reset from the front-panel button got the receivers to see each-other.

Good luck!

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bimmerdude

Tutor

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4 Messages

15 years ago

Unfortunately the resets didn't help. The two DVRs stil see each other's playlists but when the show is selected, the DVR hangs up for a minute and an error window pops up saying unable to locate media. After trying it a few times I noticed a red circle next to each episode in the playlist. Does the red circle give you guys any clues as to what the cause is?

Thanks again!

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litzdog911

ACE - Sage

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46.4K Messages

15 years ago

bimmerdude:
The red circle usually means that another DVR or HD Receiver on your network is accessing that DVR's recordings. The DVR can only stream video to one device at a time.

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mwa96imp

Contributor

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3 Messages

15 years ago

Sorry to say, I was not able to make MRV work w/ an HR21 & HR23 connected to WET160Ns networked w/ my 54mps 2WIRE router. Each DVR would see the other DVR and note the presence of the material on each drive (w/ no differentiation indicating which material was on which DVR), but the playback was "herky-jerky with starts & stops and sound dropouts. I finally gave up and ran an Ethernet cable between the two units and connected them to one "switch" and one WET160N so that they could share the Internet connection and have a 100mbps connection between the DVRs. It's not perfect (I've seen some artifacts like you might see on a very windy day), but it works well and I'd settle for it to not have to have a "power inserter" at each DVR.

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bimmerdude

Tutor

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4 Messages

15 years ago

Yeah, I'm starting to accept the fact that using my wireless network will not allow for MVR. I am very disappointed to say the least. If greywolf is right and DTV won't support Multi Room over wireless networks I believe it is a mistake. So many of their customers already have networks and would love to be able to take advantage of this exciting feature. I believe the adoption rate will be severely cut down if more equipment is needed to order to have the MVR function work correctly. Thanks to all who contributed to this thread!

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dcd

Expert

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20.7K Messages

15 years ago

Some folks apparently think Directv could make the MRV system work properly via wireless if they chose to do so. Wireless communications sends data in "bursts" thus the herky jerky playback (or the inability to stream at all). This problem is common to wireless networks and we see it every day in the Directv2PC forum. To a lesser degree is the problem bimmerdude is having with wired, the switch/router combination on some networks have difficulty as well. The DECA system will network each box directly, no wireless and no router involved. I'm convinced that if each of the prior two posters could have an hour with a DECA system they would be pleased as punch. It would be a big upgrade to both of your systems. Of course DECA will not be forced on anyone, but one day not too far off it will be built in to all of the HD boxes and a single DVR media center will serve the home and communicate with the clients via coax and DECA.

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midiwall

Tutor

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8 Messages

15 years ago

@dcd: "Wireless communications sends data in "bursts" thus the herky jerky playback (or the inability to stream at all)."
---
As I mentioned above, this is a falsehood. There's is nothing specific to wireless that creates burst data traffic. My Roku boxes present 720p 5.1 streams just fine across a wireless network. Please point me/us to the DirecTV2PC forum and I'd be happy to explain this all again over there.

I've been writing network based applications since there were networks to write for, and I've written TCP stacks from the ground up. I have NEVER had to code specifically for a wireless network.

DirecTV engineered MRV totally wrong, it's very apparent to those folks that do this for a living.

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