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[stonebrain]

I am using one WD media player with a DNS-323 and a single hard drive with no problems.I would like to get a second media player for a second TV.Will I have any problems accessing the hard dive from two TVs at the same time?
Thanks

[jamieburchell]

I'm not sure anyone can speculate without first hand experience- it also depends on other factors like how you are connecting, what you are streaming etc. I'd hazard a guess that playing music files simultaniously would be fine, streaming 2 blu-ray rips at the same time through one network might be a different story...

[dannycalgary87]

I think it should be fine, even if you are just using a fast ethernet router. If you do the math:

100Mbit/s for the switch, = approx 12.5MB/sec.

Lets say we have a 20GB Rip and is about 2 hours. (That is pretty large unless you are doing 0 compression).

20000MB/2h * 1h/3600s = 2.8MB/sec

Even multiplying those by 2 wouldn't come close to your switch limits.

I may be wrong somewhere but I know my math is right at least

[stonebrain]

My network drive is connected to a gigabit switch and everything on my 1.5 TB drive is
Divx or Xvid.
I would like to be able to play back these video files simultaneously on 2 TVs.

[jamieburchell]

You'll probably be fine with compressed video files like these. Unfortunately it's a suck-it-and-see.
As a quick test you could try opening multiple videos on your PC and find the limits.

[Buhric]

well it really depends on the video and the bitrate....
just like dannycalgary87 says...

But his numbers are really optimistic.... I have a Gibabit switch and my file transfers rarely goes over 11MB/sec.

But thats the best case scenario.... what if you are accessing movies that are fragmented,
like the drive will try to read 2 files from different places at the same time and the DNS-323 drive read performances are not that great....

In my opinion, you should be ok to see 2 different 1.4GB movies (~1h30)
But if one is watching a BD rip (12GB and up) then I think you can forget having both WDTV watching wihtout any stuttering...

[perfectdark]

You WILL be FINE

I have 3 WDTV Live units and the DNS-323 and i have had all 3 units playing at the same time, different mkv's 8Gb + in size 1080p resolution with no stutter or issues and this is all with wired 100Mbps

[JavaLawyer]

It sounds like your network can handle the load. . . but the real answer ultimately boils down to the bandwidth consumed by each concurrent video file.  

You can easily measure the "actual" bandwidth consumed by one video file and extrapolate from there, or look at the media info for your "average" video file and crunch the numbers.  Another factor to consider is whether the WDTV contains an on-board cache to buffer the stream to smooth out small interruptions.  

I use the Netgear EVA 8000 without a problem on my DNS-343, but run into intermittent trouble when I'm copying large files to the NAS while a very high-quality video file is playing.