Media server buffering issues

I recently set up a home server to store all out videos and music on, and when I'm streaming content to any of our hardwired PCs it works perfectly with no dropped frames or audio. However, when I try to watch anything on my laptop over wireless (and these are not HD encodes or anything), the playback will drop a frame or two every few seconds. It appears that there's no buffering at all going on, even when I manually change the settings in Media Player to buffer 10-15 seconds of video, playback still starts instantly and it does not buffer anything, so I get the choppiness. It's like WMP is totally ignoring my buffering settings.

 

Share a folder on one of the hardwired PCs and copy a big file to your notebook.
Notice the speed it's happening at- maybe it's simply a wireless issue of your Wi-Fi being very slow. It can be something as simple to fix as changing few settings but may be more complicated too.

 

My router is wireless N but my connection is only going at 1-1.5 megabyte/second. I made sure the router (Cisco E1000) is operating in N-only mode but the video I was using as a test isn't even close to 1 MB/s. It's not like I'm getting huge pauses or anything, more like momentary stuttering. I was hoping that changing the buffering settings would fix it, but they don't seem to be taking effect.

How can I go about improving video playback or alternately speeding up the router?

 

1MB/s is way too slow for 802.11g let alone 802.11n.
What's the speed at which you are connected to the router (according to Windows)?

What type of security settings do you use- it should be WPA2+AES.
How far are you from the router?

 

Security setting according to the router is "WPA2 Personal" and Windows reports the network as Wireless-N.

 

And the connection speed reported by Windows would be?
Use inSSIDer to survey wireless networks and change channel if needed.

Also- since this while search for a problem might be going in an entirely wrong direction- please check out another video player like media player classic.

 

Might be an issue of signal strength - I get 5 MB/s in the same room as the router.

How do I see the connection speed reported by Windows?

Could it be that Windows is reporting an N network but it's still running at G speeds? I should be getting more than 5 MB/s when I'm less than 5 feet away from the router, shouldn't I?


EDIT: Here is how Windows sees my network:




I think I might have fixed the problem. Router was almost at ground-level. I moved it up to a higher shelf and now I get ~5 mbps transfer speeds from my room (where I was trying to watch a movie previously) and Windows reports a connection speed of 65 mbps. Not the advertised 300, but it seems to be good enough for the time being.

 

Not really- 5MB/s is acceptable for 802.11n.
It depends on your card and how many spatial streams it uses but that's irrelevant at this point.
Do you still have issues when streaming when you're in the same room as the router?

 

Fixed it - moved the router to a higher shelf. Ah, the simple things. Windows always reported 5 bars so I had no idea that was messing with transfer speeds. And it's always been fine for internet which doesn't ever use more than 10 mbit anyways.

My old G router got less than 1MB/s on file transfers, for reference.