Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

OVERVIEW: I bought these in hopes that I could stream my Blu-ray collection (uncompressed) to my WDTV Live Plus from a NAS drive (more details at end of review). A lot of information out there on the Interwebs said this was nearly impossible, but I was tired of having to compress all of my Blu-rays with Handbrake in order to stream them over wireless (and I still had stuttering). I saw them for a good price on another site, so I decided to give them a try anyway. To my surprise, they actually worked! INSTALLATION: This kit ships with two powerline adapters, two (too short) ethernet cables, a setup CD, and some "light" documentation. There is a utility that installs from the CD that can report the transmit and receive speeds of your adapters, which are dead easy to install--just plug both into a wall outlet, then an ethernet cable into each one and your router/internet-enabled device. They find each other automatically and start talking almost instantly. There is also a button on the side of each adapter labeled "ENCRYPT" that you can use to form a secure connection between them so your neighbors can't get on to your network. (Because this would require them sharing your electrical wiring AND having powerline adapters, the possibility is remote so I didn't fool with it.) When I fired up the utility (installs from the CD), it reported that I was only getting about 50 Mbps throughput. Unfortunately I did not have any spare electrical outlets, so I had to plug the router-end adapter into a wall tap. I moved the other one (connected to the WDTV) to a bare outlet and the utility then reported about 123 TX and 111 RX throughput. Although this is a fraction of the rated speed of 500 Mbps (which you'll never come close to in real life), I fired up some test 1080p MKVs with constant bitrates (the "Birds test files," which you can Google to find) to check the actual throughput. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to stream up to 70 Mbps without issue, and then a couple of m2ts files straight from a Blu-ray folder structure as well. Since the maximum spec'd bitrate of Blu-ray is 54 Mbps, I am in the clear. And considering that I'm not even following the instructions (since I'm not plugging both adapters directly into the wall), that's pretty amazing! As a point of reference, I also have a pair of MoCA adapters (these: NETGEAR MCAB1001 MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter Kit (Black) connected to a Boxee Box in the living room, and they provide about the same throughput. A COUPLE OF CAVEATS: Powerline performance is highly dependent on your home's electric wiring. Apparently if you have each adapter on a different phase (i.e. on switches on opposite sides of your breaker box) then that can significantly reduce throughput. I am lucky, because although my router and WDTV are in separate rooms, they are not only on the same phase, but even the same breaker switch. This means that there is less wiring between the adapters and therefore less attenuation in the signal. FIRMWARE INFO: I have an old pair of 1st-gen powerline adapters (Netgear 85Mbps Powerline Network Adapter XET1001) that can't get anywhere near to streaming even compressed movies, so obviously powerline has come a long way. These Zyxels ship with firmware v5.2.0, which seems to be newer firmware than the Trendnet 500 Mbps adapters that smallnetbuilder gave mixed reviews to. In fact, I believe it is newer than the Netgear 500 Mbps that got more positive reviews. I'm pretty sure that all the currently available 500 Mbps adapters are based on the same Atheros chipset, which means that the only variable among them would be the firmware version. Here are a few relevant details about my network setup: ROUTER: D-Link DIR-655, gigabit (D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Gigabit Wireless Router) MEDIA SERVER: WD MyBook Live 3TB NAS (Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive), connected w/gigabit ethernet to router MEDIA RECEIVER: WDTV Live Plus (Western Digital WD TV Live Plus 1080p HD Media Player), running aftermarket WDLXTV firmware (v5.0.0) STREAMING PROTOCOL: NFS (not the more common SMB, also known as Windows Sharing. With SMB I can only get about 30-40 Mbps throughput over these adapters, which is typically not enough to stream Blu-rays). The MyBook has NFS built in, but the WDTV can only stream over NFS with WDLXTV firmware. STREAMING FILETYPE: 1080p .m2ts (uncompressed Blu-ray) and lossless MKV (created from said Blu-rays)