First Sling experience

[bwexler]

First time actually watching a recorded show from my new HWS on my computer in the bedroom office.
The computer is connected by RJ45 the HWS is WiFi, to the same router with 802.11N WiFi.
It was a little slow to start, and not very responsive to controls like skip ahead or skip back, to skip commercials.
I was able to watch the show but there was a bit hesitation, pausing, audio drop out.

Is all this normal? It was set at about 1/3 the screen and "goof" quality, not HD.

What can/should I do to improve the experience?

 

[kwindrem]

WiFi should be more than sufficient to get you HD quality in your home. It sounds like something may be wrong with your network or your computer may not be fast enough to keep up. I had a Mac Mini that had trouble streaming video especially with a full 1920x1080 image. It had a 1.5 GHz Core Solo processor. Seems like a Core Duo is needed for HD streaming.

Control is definitely S L O W but I get HD quality at 8 Mb/s on my local LAN. I get occasional dropouts and pauses but generally it's a reasonable experience.

Of course, internet speeds are slower and therefore quality much lower. I've tried streaming to my laptop while on the road and it works but with only about 500 Kb/s upload at home, picture quality is pretty low for anything but a laptop display or tablet, and lots of freezes.

 

[bwexler]

My computer is running Windows 7 Pro on AMD 6 Core 3.8 GHZ with 16 GB RAM and drive C is an SSD. The computer should not be the problem but who knows.

The bit rate was bouncing between 1 KB and 2 KB so nothing extravagant.

 

[kwindrem]

My computer is running Windows 7 Pro on AMD 6 Core 3.8 GHZ with 16 GB RAM and drive C is an SSD. The computer should not be the problem but who knows.

The bit rate was bouncing between 1 KB and 2 KB so nothing extravagant.

Probably not the computer. Check your local network. 1-2 Kb/s is way too low for a local connection.

I just checked again and get about 8 Mb/s. Both my computer and Hopper are connected via Cat 5 on a 100 Mb/s ethernet.