Help me decide: ASUS RT-N16 or Netgear WNDR3700?

thanks for asking! i went out of town for 10 days after the cable arrived and since then mired up in other works. i will try the method soon, and would definitely report back here.
 
blr_p said:
Ah, but there is still one thing i'd like to know.

What the bitrate of your 14GB 1080p movies is like to get a ballpark figure of bandwidth required. Want to know what (in theory) is and isn't possible to stream via wifi.

There is this nifty tool that analyses any video files and posts a peak and avg rate. Can you run it on some of your movies 1080p and 720p and let us know what the bitrates (peak & avg) are like. Its quite quick and takes only a few mins per movie.

Bitrate Viewer
Click to expand...

Avengers 1080p - 14.4GB
AVG bitrate - 13011kbps
Peak bitrate - 52077kbps

The Dark Knight 1080p - 17.3GB
AVG bitrate - 14739kbps
Peak bitrate - 40728kbps

The Perks of being a Wallflower 1080p - 7.6GB
AVG bitrate - 9145kbps
Peak bitrate - 23402kbps

K-Pax 720p - 4.3GB
AVG bitrate - 4546kbps
Peak bitrate - 28645kbps
 
rdst_1 said:
K-Pax 720p - 4.3GB
AVG bitrate - 4546kbps
Peak bitrate - 28645kbps
Click to expand...
This k-pax file is interesting for a 720p as it has a peak rate SEVEN times the avg rate (!) Can you post a screen grab of bitrate viewer for this file only.

To watch it will require a minimum of 30-40mbs in throughput. Well, it will mostly play but the points where the peaks occur will stutter. So smooth playback and a seamless performance requires enough bandwidth. A client with a configurable playback buffer will give some flexibility here. But the network still has to be faster than the files bitrate for the playback buffer to be practical. Which file bitrate ? network has to be at least 3 times faster than avg rate. So a buffer allows playback with lower available bandwidth. But too many peaks in a short duration could still get in the way, iffy.

This will suffice for the perks of being a wallflower too which is 1080p. N300 2.4ghz could handle this. N150 no. Surprising a 1080p will fit here but what's possible depends on the file's encoding rate. If its very high it might not work as it might exceed what is capable but others at lower rates will work

Avengers requires 60-70mbs throughput which will handle Dark Knight too. Only on N300 5 Ghz. This means you have to be closer to maintain the throughput at those rates. So watching either in the same room as the router or max one wall away. No further than 15-20 ft. N450 gives more speed but you have to be closer to get it otherwise it drops. At 15 ft a N450 is effectively the same as a N300 at 5Ghz. So 3 stream N450 at 2.4ghz will give better throughput beyond. Iffy for these two particular files but feasible with others of lower rates and further at 2.4ghz.

MIMO or 2x2 is necessary in both cases. A network file protocol with as little overhead is desirable here so DLNA would be better as it works over HTTP or even FTP than SMB. NFS is good too but requires compliance on the client side.

And i don't know how accurate bitrate viewer is but hopefully will get to test it out with more people here and compare with real world performance. How high the routers jitter in throughput will also be important. The lower the jitter the better.

There's three elements in this equation with their associated parameters that have to be right for it to all work.

server (SMB/NFS/DLNA/FTP) ---> network (capable N300 dual band router) ---> client (server protocol compatible, MIMO and playback buffer)

The key here is to know your files, to find ones that are exceptional like that k-pax. Knowing the peak & avg rates of your files is necessary to ensure whether they can be played over wifi or not. Looking for a utility that can recursively scan folders of files in batch mode and then list the rates but not found one yet.

Does anybody know what the max peak rate allowed for 720p and 1080p is ?

IF its possible to establish some limit here then spec-ing the router becomes easier. The no-brainer is to use wire which i advocate as it removes this variable.
 
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