[MW Forums]

When Christopher Breen tried to turn his Mac mini into a multimedia center, he had trouble streaming full-length movies via Front Row. However, a reader has a tip to overcome that limitation. more

[agallisa]

Yeah the only option I have found when I try an stream movies (over a wireless connection) to my powerbook as I lay in bed is to use mPlayer. This seems to be the only player out there which will let you force movies to buffer before playing.

[pairof9s]

This all just shows that while it's technically possible to stream videos through Front Row, it is nowhere near being a simple and enjoyable solution for most users. My .02 is this is why we've not seen the mythical next gen video iPod that will try to use wireless streaming of widescreen movies; it's not practically feasible right now.

[chevyorange]

VLC has streamed a full DVD to my iBook with AirPort extreme once... but it did hiccup once every few minutes.
Compressed files seem to do really well though.

[Machound]

It's odd that Apple is having all this trouble streaming video. I never had problems streaming 20 MBPS 1080i MPEG2 video over my 100baseT network Mac-only home network to my LinkPlayer2 media player using I-O Data's AVeL media server software. Nor did I have any problem streaming high bitrate video with the freeware/open source program Wizd. I've heard good results for other people using ElGato's $99 UPnP program, EyeConnect, and there are at least a couple other alternative free streaming video servers out there that work with Macs.
I've been able to stream 480i MPEG2 video from my PowerBook to my LinkPlayer2 via my old Netgear WGR614 (WIFIg) router 18+ months ago without dropping frames, though I don't recall the actual bitrates. (However, 54 MBPS WIFIg chokes on 20 MBPS 1080i video every few seconds.)
Gigabit ethernet should have adequate bandwidth to stream 50 simultaneous 1080i video streams -- real world 10-20 streams -- without problems, so where is Apple's bottleneck???