How To Stream Video Over Wireless

Nov 08, 2006

I have a MacBook Pro that I rather enjoy watching movies on. The problem is that it only has an 80 gb hard drive and even reasonably compressed DVDs still take up a solid 1-1.5 gb. So I keep all my DVDs I’ve ripped and encoded on an external hard drive. This kinda puts a tether on the laptop for watching movies. A bit of a problem on a Saturday morning when you’d rather watch a movie in bed than in the home office. The obvious solution was to use the wireless network I already had set up.

What You’ll Need

  1. A storage server (I use a Mac Mini + external HD)
  2. A wireless router (perferably 802.11g, 802.11b is a bit slow for our needs)

The Problem: Low Bandwidth

The nice thing about wireless routers is that they free you up from running cat-5 cable. This is almost a necessity for those of us that live in apartments and don’t have the option of running cat-5 cable nicely behind the walls.

While 802.11g advertises 54 Mbps you’re more likely to see somewhere in the 15-25 Mbps range depending on signal strength and outside interference. This is significantly less than the 100 Mbps you’d get with a wired solution.

My first attempt was wirelessly connecting to the external HD through the Mini from the MacBook Pro. I opened up March of the Penguins and attempted to watch it. The results weren’t pretty. While the movie would play it would frequently stop and skip as it ran into bandwidth issues. Obviously simply having a shared movie folder available on the wireless network was not going to work.

The Solution: Streaming

Luckily there’s a solution for transmitting video over a connection that has limited bandwidth … streaming. The initial problem is not so much finding a player than can handle streaming video, but an application to act as a server and handle the actual streaming of the movie itself.

Quicktime has a streaming server, but it only comes with OS X Server (and at $499 isn’t really an option). Luckily VLC, the open source swiss army knife of video players, comes to the rescue.

You just need to put one copy of VLC on your laptop to view the streaming video, and another on your media server to generate the actual stream itself. VLC has a built in wizard for generating a stream off of a video, and is fairly painless. If you run into any problems the documentation is decent. I chose a basic UDP stream and it worked pretty well. I haven’t really had a chance to dig into the other options yet.

The Results

So with the Mini streaming March of the Penguins I fired up VLC on the MacBook Pro and opened up the stream. The result was pretty good. I didn’t notice any big issues with video quality, and only a few times throughout the entire movie did I notice any blocky pixelation issues if the connection had some hiccups.

So while I haven’t quite reached my media server nirvana yet, I’ve crossed the first initial hurdle with minimal fuss and achieved a basic, working solution.