Playing video over network

[spurty]

Hello everyone need a little help, any tips appreciated...

I recently acquired a reasonable spec (pentium 4 2.6ghz, 1 gig ram, geforce 6200 gfx card, win xp pro) pc and thought I would put it in the lounge, hooked up to my 32-inch lcd tv. I have all my video files on another pc upstairs (pretty high spec) so thought I'd share the files and play videos over the network. I could access the files and they initially seemed to play ok, but kept pausing every 30 seconds or so (audio and video) just stuttered for a fraction of a second, then carried on. Just enough to be annoyingly unwatchable. Same thing happened with 3 media players on default settings (media player classic, vlc media player and wmp11).

Are there some settings I need to tweak, eg buffering the file as it plays...or is there a different media player designed for the purpose? Is my network just not up to the job (i use a belkin 54mbps router, lounge pc connected with cable, upstairs wireless). The data transfer over the system seems good, as my 10mbps broadband works reliably at full speed upstairs over wireless connection.

Finally assuming I can solve the above problem and keep the 2nd pc in the lounge, is the processor good enough to decode this new H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format as I believe this is very processor heavy

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

You could try something like TVersity, however it does sound like a bandwidth issue. Wireless isn't the best for high bandwidth video playback.