Lately I’ve been looking for a bit more bandwidth in my home network to be able to stream HD video over wireless and moving to N seemed like the logical choice.
For the last 3 years I’ve run a Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT firmware and it has been solid as a rock – best wireless I’ve ever had and will be a very hard act to follow.
My “new” work laptop supports Wireless-N and I get about 150MB/s at the office (which is faster than my wired lan at home) so I thought it could be a potential solution to my bandwidth problem.
So needing a bit more wireless bandwidth – the search was on for a new DD-WRT compatible wireless solution.
I’m currently considering the ASUS RT-N16 – seeems to have excellent specs – plenty of grunt, 2 USB ports and supports either DD-WRT or Tomato firmware. From what I’ve read the ASUS firmware is flaky and results in wireless dropouts but those on Whirlpool that have upgraded to either Tomato or DD-WRT are reporting good performance. In addition the RT-N16 has a fast processor (480MHz stock + ability to overclock), 32 MB Flash (which is huge – even the biggest installs of DD-WRT are only just over 8MB) – to me this seems like a really fast piece of kit capable of running DD-WRT. The 2 USB ports bring into play usage as a torrent box plus a printer hub.
The ASUS RT-N16 seems to have a hugh amount of potential – I think I’m going to have to get one and see how far I can stretch it.
Anyone else have experience with this model? Other thoughts?
Warning to all – this is a very long & somewhat technical post…
You know, I’m really not a programmer any more, I can’t remember the last time I wrote a piece of production code – and in my current role – believe me – that’s probably a good thing – I now leave that to the expert Java developers in my team. But, I came across my first MythTV recording that was from CH10 (Aus) and like all commercial channels it had ads…Argh!!!
To be honest – I don’t watch that much commercial TV anymore – so to be honest, this is rare, but it was a show that we regularly watch so – it became a priority 
Anyway, from my recent experience, MythTV does a really great job of recording anything you point it at and it’s also very good at finding and flagging most of the TV ads but it’s really not very good at finding the start & end of a show – and trust me if you record anything on CH10 unless you leave 5 mins before the scheduled start of the show and at least and 15 mins after the scheduled finish – you are going to miss it. To magnify issues somewhat – we were watching the show upstairs on a non MythTV player – SO THERE WAS NO AUTO AD SKIPPING – and at that point – it was game over – I needed to find something to fix the ad problem or next time… (you know the rest)…
Well, as always in IT, the answer is always more complicated that was originally envisioned… So there are two parts to this simple endeavor Read more…
I purchased the original WDTV (Western Digital HD Media Player) over 12 months ago – they are a fantastic little box that will play just about anything and have full 1080p HDMI output with 5.1 digital out – needless to say it has served me very well.
My only negative comment is that it required a lot of sneaker time (copying files from my torrent server onto USB drives and then plugging them into the WDTV player to view them on my HDTV).
Well, Western digital recently released a new version, the WDTV Live – the best new feature is that it includes is ethernet (on board) and wireless support (with selected adaptors). I’ve upgraded to the WDTV Live and I have to admit – I think it’s worth it.
Not only is the new WDTV Live faster than the original version it also supports DTS decoding and I’ve also found it’s Read more…
