Newbie struggling to setup wireless home network

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi all!

I just got a shiny new Pi 3, and downloaded the most recent OSMC image yesterday. Everything boots up fine. I connected my Pi to my wireless, everything looks ok.

Here’s where things go rough. I have a Windows 7 Home PC with media on it, which I want to wirelessly stream to the Pi which is in another room and connected to my TV. I enabled UPnP, which lets me find on the Pi the Documents\Videos (or Images, Music etc.) folder of the PC. I was also able to setup a Samba connection to the PC and find a test shared folder; in addition I installed the SMB server add-on and am able to access the Pi from the PC.

However, I can’t seem to stream a video on the Pi. The connection seems flaky - sometimes it just searches for a bit and then says something to the effect of “I can’t play this”, sometimes it starts playing but then the playback slows and ends up crashing, and sometimes it seems to play just fine!

In addition, I tried transfering files from the PC to the Pi and I’m getting speeds of around 300 kb/s. I download stuff from the internet at 2.5 Mb/s reliably…

I probably have multiple issues simultaneously here but I’m rather new at home networking so any pointers would help. I read something about power management issues but I seem to understand this should be fixed by now. Any ideas?

Some additional info: the wireless signal is 2.4 GHz 802.11n. There’s a router, an extender (thick walls here…) and the PC connected to the extender, while the Pi is connected directly to the router (everything wirelessly). There are also smartphones and tablets but none were doing anything while I was experiencing the issues above.

2

We have no idea what this means. But in solving such issues, the error is important. You must provide logs. To get a better understanding of the problem you are experiencing we need more information, including logs from you. Our wiki contains detailed steps for providing the relevant info we need to help you.

As far as networking, avoid the WiFi at all costs. Either run the Ethernet to these critical locations or purchase a set of homeplugs and avoid the entire WiFi problem.

3

Fair enough; I’ll post a log this evening. As for wifi I don’t have a choice: I can’t run cables through the entire apartment or drill through 1-foot stone walls, and since the building was built in 1840 and the wiring probably done in the 1920s you can imagine how reliable powerline is here… I’m lucky if I get 500 kb/s speeds on powerline (in fact I’m kind of amazed it works at all).

With a different router (recently had to change my ISP) I did get Wifi transfer speeds of up to 3-4 Mb/s so I know it’s doable in this apartment. Even with this one, from the PC to a tablet I can get transfer speeds of 1 Mb/s…

4

Mount SMB via fstab to take advantage of readahead

5

Replying to myself for posterity: I fixed all my issues by improving my network. Now that I have stable 20+ Mpbs wifi everywhere, everything’s butter-smooth.

I’ll still look into that fstab thing as soon as I figure out how to ssh :).

6

Details of how to access OSMC by SSH can be found in the OSMC wiki.