I’ve got a USB hard drive attached to my Airport Extreme which is connected via ethernet to a 1.66 GHz Intel Dual Core Mac Mini with 1 GB of RAM that’s hooked up to my TV. When I watch a movie* in iTunes or QuickTime that I’ve ripped using Handbrake at 2500 kbps, the sound and picture sometimes stutter and skip. I don’t have the problem watching the same film over wifi on my 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4 GB of RAM. Nor is there an issue if the film is stored on the Mac Mini’s hard drive, so it seems to me that the ethernet is the bottleneck, however, shouldn’t my wifi connection be an even bigger bottleneck? Short of moving the hard drive and connecting it directly to the Mac Mini (which is not possible for a host of reasons), is there anything I can do to improve the performance when playing back movies?
*For the record, these are movies I own and have ripped mostly so my kids don’t ruin the original disk
Go to “About this Mac” under the Apple menu.
Select “More Info.”
Click on the Network item on the left side.
Highlight the Ethernet connection on the right side of the window.
At the very bottom should be a “Media Subtype” item, and it should say 100baseTX.