[TheLoz]

Hello,

A couple of months ago I set up the remote media streaming in Windows 7 and I've been using it with my Latitude E6500 with no problems whatsoever. If you haven't tried this yet, I can highly recommend it. It's a new feature of Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7, and in my opinion it works better than The Orb or TVersity and it's laughably easy and quick to set up unlike two programs I may have just mentioned.

Anyway, I recently started using it on my Dell Mini 9. I've got 2GB of RAM, and I'm running Windows 7 Pro, and I find the streaming performance to be pretty sub-par, even with nothing else running and the process priority set to 'high'. While streaming videos, it skips constantly every few seconds, and when streaming music, it skips a lot for the first 30 seconds or so of the track.

Incidentally, the same thing happens when streaming from other shared media libraries on a local network ('Other Libraries' in WMP's library view), so it is unlikely to be the remote component causing problems. Bizarrely, I can play MP3s directly from a mapped network drive absolutely fine without any skipping at all.

Does anybody else with a Mini 9/10v/1012, running Windows 7 Pro, have the same issues with streaming media in WMP? Did you find any ways to improve the performance?

Thanks,
Loz

[reflex]

Does it improve with a wired connection?

What format/bitrate/resolution are the videos?

[TheLoz]

I've tried it with a network cable as well and it skips regardless of which connection type is used. I tried to stream a 128kbps MP3 file and I still encountered skipping. It appears to skip while it's buffering, then play smoothly after the whole file is loaded. I also get skipping when streaming MP3s from the internet. Similar behaviour occurs when I try to stream an MP3 radio station from this site:

Streaming directory -- streams & radios

I'm really just wondering if a clean build might be worth a go, or if the almighty Atom CPU is simply not capable of handling 128kbps MP3 streaming in this manner.

As far as video bitrates, I'm not sure, but it's transcoded on the fly by the remote library. I can live with the video skipping though, it's the music I'm most concerned about because it completely ruins the listening experience.

[reflex]

I only notice the Atom CPU's limitations when playing high-res videos. Simple audio should be an easy task for the hardware.

[TheLoz]

That's what I was thinking too! I think the streaming must be done in a really inefficient way in WMP. I copied the stream url from WMP and played it back in VLC player. No skips, no jumps. Such a shame VLC doesn't support uPNP AV browsing, and I'd have to play the files one by one so it's not really workable.

Don't suppose anybody else with Win7 fancies testing this out on their Mini and posting the results?