Video card vs network speed

[czink1982]

What matters more when streaming video from Hulu and such sites. Would stepping up from a 10/100 to a gigabit router help me or not?

Thanks

[guns1inger]

What is your broadband plan speed ?
Are you connecting to the router at 10 or 100 presently ?

If you have a fast ADSL2 connection (10 - 20 Mb) and are only connecting to the router at 10Mb then you might see some improvement. However if you are connecting at 100Mb, you won't. If you are connecting at 10 Mb then you should look at why. If it is your NIC then changing the router would not fix the problem. If you have a 100 or 1000 Mb NIC and are connecting at 10 Mb, check the router config.

It would also be worth running a tracert to Hulu (or where ever) to see just where the bottle necks are. You should run this several times to get some averages, but chances are the problem lies further out - your ISP proxy, the destination site or somewhere in between.

[czink1982]

Thanks for your quick reply. I am running at 100, so that answers that. I have Fios at 15Mbps. I will try a tracert and see what I get.

Thanks

[jagabo]

The speed at which Hulu (and most other streaming video sites) sends the video is probably you're limiting factor. Standard definition material is usually in the 1 Mb/s range. Even high def streaming sites usually limit the files to 5 or 6 Mb/s. The next bottleneck, should you find one that will send you data at higher speeds, would be your FIOS connection at 15 Mb/s. Upgrading your LAN from 100 Mb/s to 1000 Mb/s Ethernet won't help at all.

With a 15 Mb/s connection, if you're not getting smooth streaming the problem is almost always at the server -- it's overloaded. By the way, test your connection speed at speedtest.net.

[disturbed1]

The Revo uses the Ion chipset correct? If so, your graphics card is fine as well. Use the beta Flash plugin from Adobe Labs. This adds hardware accelerated decoding for Flash videos, which the Nvidia Ion is supported. If you're not using an Acer Revo, please update your profile, and give us some info as to which Video Card you are using.

[czink1982]

I am using the Revo with the Ion chipset. I also installed Adobe Flash 10.1 beta and that did help. Thanks for all the info and for saving me $100.