In the past I would download a movie to my upstairs computer, copy it to a USB flash drive, bring it downstairs and watch it on my TV through my Blu-ray player. My thinking was I could set up a Raspberry Pi as a HTPC connected to my TV and either download the movie directly to that or FTP to it from my upstairs computer.
I bought a Vilros Raspberry Pi 2 Complete Starter Kit with Edimax WiFi and set it up with OSMC. Everything seems to work fine.
However, when I transfer a movie (around 3GB) using SFTP through Filezilla I’m getting a transfer rate of around 160 KiB/s. At that rate it will take 5 hours to transfer the movie.
I’m doing this with wifi with a Linksys E2500 router N router. No way to run Ethernet cable from upstairs to downstairs.
I would start by temporarily connecting your Pi to your upstairs PC via an Ethernet cable and just double check that copy speed is as you would expect it to be with Wifi removed from the equation.
If you’re trying to copy onto the SD card you’ll probably find you’re limited to somewhere between 4MB/sec and 8MB/sec depending on the performance of the SD card as the SD card write speed will be the bottleneck. (It will be faster during playback though - up to 20MB/sec)
If that seems OK then try your wifi adaptor again in the same room as the AP to see what speed you get. If it seems OK in the same room you could put it back downstairs and try normal wireless troubleshooting - eg try different wifi channels etc.
If you can’t get good results over wifi another option would be to use a pair of powerline Ethernet adaptors, and generally this would be a faster more reliable solution.
BTW if your network performance is good enough (whether Wifi or Powerline Ethernet) there’s no need to copy the file to the Pi before playing it - simply stream it directly from a file share on your PC by adding a Video source in Kodi that points at your PC’s share.
Well first I would suggest to figure out what goes on with your wifi and the performance.
Option 1 check the basic network throughput with iperf (sudo apt-get install iperf)
Option 2 check wireless signal with wavemon (sudo apt-get install wavemon)
He wrote it before: Because he doesn’t want to have his pc runnnig all the time…for obvious reasons like it’s way more power consuming than a Raspberry Pi. @giorgian00 Another thought: Why not also let your Pi do the download work? There are many programs for this specific task and I remember even my old Pi1 managed this good. Just unpacking files will take longer because it’s very cpu intensive.
What I don’t understand is why you don’t let the RPi download stuff. It doesn’t make sense doing this on a PC. Raspberry uses a fraction of the power and can run 24/7. Copying stuff to watch sounds very 2003 to me
How does 1.7MiB/s means that it is OK?
Also did you do the check with wavemon as I suggested?
Also suggest that you check your wifi environment at the location where the Pi is located. If you have a android phone install “Wifi Analyzer” to check the channels and interference.
Try temporarily changing mode from Mixed to N it used to be if something connected at a slower speed such as G then all devices would be limited to this speed, not sure if that has changed
Yes, I’ll either put an external hard drive or a USB stick on the RPi. But as Morte said I can’t do much until I resolve the transfer issue. Thanks.
Invest in a good set of Powerline adapters. One at your router connected to it with network cable, the other one upstairs where you want to put your RPi, connected to it with a network cable.
For always on/streaming/downloading it is not good to have floors/walls between your router and client, unless you invest a lot of money in a heavy WiFi gateway, but the USB WiFi adapter will still be as limited as it is now.
Also if you do manage to have a good WiFi connection, the RPi will eat the available WiFi band with and you might notice slower speed on your other WiFi devices like phone/laptop. I would highly recommend Powerline as someone else mentioned before. But buy a good set.
