Streaming DVD movies over Dual Band Airport Extreme Airdisk

Hello,
This is my first post in the discussion forums. I have been a long time reading of the discussion forums. I recently bought a late 2009 dual band Airport Extreme base station. I have been trying to stream DVD movies (TS_VIDEO) using the Airdisk feature. What I did, as an experiment, was to hook up the dual band Airport Extreme to my 2009 Mac-Mini using an ethernet cable from the base station to the Mac-Mini. I enabled file sharing on the Airport extreme base station. I hooked an external hard drive to the base station via a USB port on the base station. I mounted the Airdisk on the Mac-MIni. When I play the ripped DVD movies (TS_VIDEO) from the Airdisk I get a lot of stuttering using Front-Row. According to the Apple customer service reps, this is normal behavior. Can anybody comment on if this is normal behavior.

An uncompressed DVD should have a maximum data rate of around 6 or 7 Mbps and so be well within the nominal 300 Mbps of an 802.11n network - even allowing for the slower actual speeds attained due to networking overheads and weak signals. However, given that you have the latest Airport Extreme it sounds like you may be suffering from the common fault many are reporting in these forums, in which disk transfer rates are very, very slow over the 5GHz 802.11n connection. Look at some of the other threads here. It is clearly a fault in the current design (not a fault with your particular unit) and something that Apple are apparently aware of. Most are hoping it will be resolved in an updated firmware at some point in the future.
Edit: I just re-read your post and notice that you said you used a physical connection between the Airport and the Mac Mini. Thus no wireless involved. Nevertheless, others have reported poor data rates with disks connected to the unit, and so this may still be the issue. Check out some of the other threads here.
Message was edited by: Paul Howland2

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