What's the best software to watch DVD's on my HTPC?

[jeffeb3]

before I moved, I had wired, Gigabit ethernet between my data server (620GB RAID 5) and my HTPC. I have a couple hundred Gig's of DVD's that I watch with PowerDVD (ver. 6.0).

But, I moved, decided wireless was good enough, and now have a D-Link wireless connection (supposedly 108Mbps, but we all know better). There is a bunch of wifi traffic in my new neighborhood, and now when I try to watch a movie (straight .VOB files here, uncompressed) it won't play for very long until it starts skipping pretty bad. It takes about an hour to copy them over the WiFi. I've had to resort to the sneakernet using a 4GB USB disk to grab the video parts and assemble them at the HTPC for viewing (it takes about ten minutes).

Since a 2 hour movie only takes an hour to transfer, I assume the speed is there, but intermittent. I think if Power DVD was more clever with the caching of the video, everything would be fine.

SO (finally), here's my question. Which DVD player application will fix my problem? What do you use? Has anyone experienced this problem before, and fixed it with a new DVD program?

As a plan B, I know I could get away with compressing the movies, and streaming them that way. I'm kind of lazy though, and I might get a portable media player soon too, I don't want to convert everything once to make it streamable, and again to make it portable. You guys are the experts, tell me what you think I should do. Free is good, but quality/ease of use is better.

[slake09]

I'd start by downloading NetStumbler (free, google it) and finding out which channels are in use nearby. The only channels that don't overlap frequencies are 1,6,11 so try to find one of those that isn't being used, or isn't being used by anything close by.

I watch movies over my wifi all the time, but I have no interference at all where I live, so I know it's possible with a good enough connection.

Next I might try putting a better antenna either on the viewing machine, the access point, or both. For short range, static applications (meaning the antenna won't be moving) there are some cheap and easy designs available on the net. Just putting a parabolic shape made out of aluminum foil behind the antennas has a surprisingly good result, again - google for the design.

If none of that worked, I'd just run the wire.

Hope that helps.

[jeffeb3]

Unfortunately, the house is a rental, and there's no chance at a wired connection, unless I want the ethernet to run across the floor, and down the stairs, which means I would have to break up with my girlfriend, probably not the best solution. I could definitely get by with some wireless N stuff if I was willing to cough up the $280 for it.

It's really strange, at my house, there are literally 10 wifi connections available at any time. Probably half of them are on 6, but I might get some good value out of scoping the channels. But I think I'm pretty much set with having traffic in my way.

When you say you watch movie over wifi, what do you mean specifically? You watch them in .VOB format? Which program do you use to watch them WMP? powerDVD? winDVD? which version? Does your WiFi signal have any encryption? WPA or WEP? I'm using WPA, but I doubt that slows down the transfer that much.

Thanks for your reply.

[jeffeb3]

If anyone stumbles upon this thread, and is interested, I ended up converting my files to Divx 720 resolution. This looks pretty good, and I'm not sure if the original DVD format is even this good. The files are significantly smaller, less than 1.5GB. They still skip over my wifi when other folks are using it, but I started streaming them through the network using videoLAN. It's kind of tricky to set up, and laborious to start each time, but it works. If I'm feeling lazy, or I have company, the faster way to do it is just to copy the divx movie to my thumb stick, and use sneakernet to carry the thumb stick downstairs.

[rallynavvie]

You may want to try TVersity as your media stream server as it supports other systems (such as PS3, PSP, Xbox, etc.).