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I’d been noticing that streaming HD videos from my NAS to my DLNA certified BD player was having intermittent buffering issues. The video would play for a while, then hang for a long while, then play a little, then hang again and so on. After a little bit of experimenting I figured that the HD streams were too large for the wireless to pump to the BD player. We’re talking about 8 to 12GB files here. So here I was, after changing all my networking equiptment to ensure the house was on a full Gigabit setup, but I couldn’t get my videos streamed from my NAS to my BD player properly. The solution was of course to get a wire to my BD player. How to do that was the issue since I didn’t have any network ports near the BD player.
I had a couple of 200Mbps Prolink homeplugs however and I figured they would be the solution, but unfortunately the stuttering didn’t stop even when I used the home plugs. I actually thought there was something wrong with my BD player, but on a hunch I decided to do some speed test over the Prolink homeplugs and I was appalled to see that they weren’t pushing data over more than 40 to 60Mbps. I went into research mode, hit Google and found out that most of the homeplugs didn’t really give great speeds, definitely never hitting what was stated on their packaging. I figured maybe it was old tech and there should be something new out there now, since most everyone was on a Gigabit network now. I was partially right, they didn’t make Gigabit homeplugs but Aztech had put out their 500Mbps homeplugs. Reading the reviews gave me a pretty good impression of the device and I headed out to purchase a pair from Challenger at S$75 each (found out later that Sim Lim was selling it at S$65, bummer!)
I plugged the devices in and it was super easy to pair, unlike the Prolink ones. Just press one of the plug’s config button for 2 seconds, watch the ‘home network’ led start to blink, go to the next plug and press it’s config button for 2 seconds. After the blinking stops, they’re paired, simple as that. I did the speed tests again and very happily saw speeds of between 200 and 220Mbps. It wasn’t 500Mbps, but as I said, the speeds are never what they advertise, but this was good enough!
Plugged the BD into the home plug and no more stuttering!
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