not programming

Gift cards at birthdays and Christmas have provided me with a sizable iTunes video collection. Some Mad Men here, Doctor Who there, It's Always Sunny, and so on. I spent an evening trying to figure out how to convert that video to .avi or somesuch so that I could stream it over my XBox360 but I failed and wasted a good deal of time. There are too many scammy programs that come up in searches that I don't trust entirely - maybe being braver would have yielded results but I don't have the time to recover if something goes wrong.

So I figure I'd just spend the $99+shipping for an Apple TV. It's just a little box with a power and HDMI connection that lets me do four things:

1) Rent media and stream it (no local storage)
2) Stream media from my iPhone
3) Stream media from iTunes on my PC
4) Watch Netflix streaming

I got 1, 2, and 4 working out of the box, but number 3 was a beating to get working. The Apple TV detects my computer (and vice versa) and it will try to stream stuff but it takes forever. A three minute music video took 15 minutes to start playing because the ATV waits for a buffer to build.

I'm mixing my tenses here, describing solved problems is tough.

Anyways, after much reconfiguring and rebooting I discovered that running a wired network connection to my PC fixed everything. This narrowed it down to my router or my wifi card in the PC.

I slept on it and figured I should do a test of what my upstream is doing so I tried to FTP a big file from my PC and found that my upstream was borked. It kept bouncing between 0 and 40 kbps rapidly. I did a search for my wifi adaptor and Win7 and found that it's a known issue. One driver update later and I've got streaming happening.

It's been a long time since I've had to do that kind of hardware troubleshooting at home. Everything has been working so well the past year since I built the new machine.

Not programming, but it prevented me from programming so it's peripherally relevant. So far the ATV has been worth picking up because now I can watch stuff on my TV instead of hunched over at my PC, and the Netflix streaming is far more reliable than the XBox simply by virtue of not constantly trying to adjust the quality which causes it to skip 1 second or so forward.