Yes, it does. Bad network cabling is IMO not the problem here. It's more likely that your home network (with its lack of collisions compared to the office one) has too high a throughput for the empeg to cope -- although 1.02 should be able to cope even with full wire speed transfer.


I agree it's probably not the cabling... Cat 3 would do fine in this situation, but I also disagree here. He's using a switch which should eliminate the collision difference. Furthermore, I've pumping into EMPEG from a gigabit network card at work, into a HP switch and then throttled down to 10Mbs to the EMPEG. Worst case situation, the switch would slow everyone down to 10mbs, but I don't think the even the DLINK $65 4 port switches are that dumb.

The biggest thing I've seen is a sensitivity to timing errors on the EMPEG protocol. In the very few tests I've ran on the network spec itself, if you delay a packet or cause a retransmission, emplode seems to hang for a bit. I've only been able to fuxor it up enough to actually cause an error a few times however.

And as an aside on this, it could very well be the actual network card in the PC. Depending on which version of the 530tx he has, it's either the Tulip chipset or the RTL8139. I have had AWFUL luck with the Tulip variant of this card in Tbirds (went through 4 of them... all of which worked fine in BX chipsets, but failed weirdly in the VIA.)

That's the biggest reason I'd say put a sniffer of some sort on the network and look to see if there are short, stub, or mangled packets. Assuming the cabling and switch is good, there should be none at all. Given that his empeg syncs at work, I'd say it was ok.

Hell, Linksys cards at $15 at compusa, you could always use a spare.