Perhaps I should briefly describe my setup first and give you some background info. I have a silver ATV1 in the living room that is wired to my router. It has an external USB drive attached to it to play but also shares media on the local network. Then I have a black ATV2 in the bedroom which is connected to the router via WiFi and there is no option to wire it. I use the ATV2 mostly for streaming media from the USB drive on ATV1. On both ATV’s I also have XBMC 11 Eden with an add on to watch Dutch TV replays, but I usually watch that only in the living room.
So far this has worked fine. But last week I upgraded my ATV2 from 4.4.4 to 5.0.2 (I just felt like doing that). With that I also installed XBMC frodo with that add on again. Coincidentally my cable provider decided to take off BVN (the only Dutch speaking TV channel in Indonesia where I live). Now the need to watch TV replays on ATV2 in de bedroom became very important. The problem is that buffering is slow and can’t keep up with the stream.
Although my internet is limited to 1mb it is fast enough to stream and I checked my router antenna’s. They have been degraded by the sun and I have ordered stronger ones meanwhile. To boost the WiFi signal I have built 2 “Windsurfers” last night to my daughter’s joy :-). It helped about 7 dbm but was not enough. The “local streaming” has an occasional 1-2 second buffer hiccup.
To put things to an apples with apples test, I plugged the ATV2 into the living room TV next to the ATV1 (wired of course). I choose the evening news stream again on the ATV2 and again it buffered very slow and could not keep up with the stream after I let it play. Then I switched over to the ATV1 and it buffered right up to a 100% in about 5 seconds and started playing until the end. What I did notice is that the picture (and maybe sound as well) was worse at the beginning, but then gradually improved along the line. It seems that the ATV2 sticks to a high quality while ATV1 adapts quality to match streaming. Does that make sense?
So apart from having to boost WiFi signal to my bedroom anyway, the limitation seems to be my internet speed. However, what is the difference between the 2 ATV’s handling the stream? Is it because ATV1 is still on XBMC 11 Eden and ATV2 on Frodo? I can’t go back to 4.4.4 because I never saved those blobs but I was wondering if I can install XBMC 11 Eden alongside with Frodo?
Any insight on how this works and what I could try is much appreciated. Sorry for the long story.. 