2011-09-15, 21:42
I have a very peculiar problem with my network during XBMC playback. Whenever I'm viewing a video from my NAS, it kills my WLAN. The WLAN doesn't go completely out, but becomes very unresponsive. Nokia phones stop seeing the network completely. On the laptop internet pages take forever to load, and sometimes time out. Even local network is practically dead. Playback on the XBMC does not stutter and I would be happy if other people in the household could use internet while XBMC is in use. Using a wired connection to the same router does not suffer from the situation.
I have tried to change the ethernet cables on all the ports, forcing to 10MB Half-Duplex (except on the NAS, which only supports Full-duplex) without luck. I also upgraded the router firmware to dd-wrt, but no change. Dd-wrt includes some traffic graphs, but there was nothing special shown there. I ran wireshark on the WLAN client, but there was no traffic to the WLAN that would explain the unresponsiveness. I have also tried to playback videos from the NAS with other clients (Windows PC) connected to the same router with cable and surprise: WLAN did not suffer from any interference. This last test led me to thinking, that there is something special either in the XBMC playback, Linux under it, or the hardware of the XBMC box.
My setup:
Router: Cisco E3000 (now with DD-WRT build 14929)
NAS: QNAP TS-219p
XBMC: Packard Bell iMax mini (aka Acer Aspire Revo Atom 230 w/ 2GB RAM)
I'm running XBMC 10.1 (Dharma) on Ubuntu Karmic
As a temporary solution, I have disabled WLAN on the Cisco and added another WLAN access point behind it. This one is cheap 10€ box and it doesn't seem to be affected by the problem... weird..
I wouldn't be writing here, unless I thought it's somehow related to XBMC inner workings..
- dimangi
I have tried to change the ethernet cables on all the ports, forcing to 10MB Half-Duplex (except on the NAS, which only supports Full-duplex) without luck. I also upgraded the router firmware to dd-wrt, but no change. Dd-wrt includes some traffic graphs, but there was nothing special shown there. I ran wireshark on the WLAN client, but there was no traffic to the WLAN that would explain the unresponsiveness. I have also tried to playback videos from the NAS with other clients (Windows PC) connected to the same router with cable and surprise: WLAN did not suffer from any interference. This last test led me to thinking, that there is something special either in the XBMC playback, Linux under it, or the hardware of the XBMC box.
My setup:
Router: Cisco E3000 (now with DD-WRT build 14929)
NAS: QNAP TS-219p
XBMC: Packard Bell iMax mini (aka Acer Aspire Revo Atom 230 w/ 2GB RAM)
I'm running XBMC 10.1 (Dharma) on Ubuntu Karmic
As a temporary solution, I have disabled WLAN on the Cisco and added another WLAN access point behind it. This one is cheap 10€ box and it doesn't seem to be affected by the problem... weird..
I wouldn't be writing here, unless I thought it's somehow related to XBMC inner workings..
- dimangi