Playing video over a local network
 

Note I wasn't sure if this should go in the tech support forum or here, but I figure it's more to do with playback...

So currently I own 2 computers, a laptop and a desktop, of these the desktop has the vast majority of my storage, and consequently my anime. So I've been trying to set up a system whereby I can play anime stored on my desktop, on my laptop. My network connection is good enough to stream high definition videos off youtube, and both my computers have the horsepower to play pretty much anything, so I would think this is all technically in the realms of possibility. However at the moment all I've gotten isn't quite doing as well as I feel it could.

What I've tried thus far is to simply set up a windows file-sharing network, which has worked fairly well thus far. I'm currently getting speeds of about 200 kb a second by simple copying(which could be probably be increased further by restraining bittorrent traffic and whatnot), though my wireless network is restrained by the fact that I need to use a repeater(annoyingly long house, what can I say), but as mentioned before I can often stream 720p video from youtube with little trouble. I've found CCCP+media player classic (fairly recent versions of both) do quite well, after about 20 seconds of loading which I can live with, while VLC pretty much melts down.

However even with my current CCCP setup I still get bits of lag every so often, so I was wondering if there's a more effective setup for this sort of thing, or technical means to speed my filesharing up. I'm fairly tech-savvy, but I'm fairly unfamiliar with this sort of thing. Have any of you ever done something similiar? What's the best way to play video from a remote computer on a local network?

I have the same kind of network at home, I have a PC with a 2Tb green.
My computer is wired and my laptop is wireless.
Simple 100Mbits network with 54Mbits wireless (G)

Both machine are under windows 7 and in the same group.

What can affect your video
Bad Router.
Router to far from the computer.
Maybe a problem with your laptop...

Cut everything (bittorrent) and copy a file to know the speed of your network (200kb/s is really not much).

Get a NAS, some of them have bittorrent client, usenet client and download managers build in. Store your anime onto it and you can play the files from your computer, laptop, consoles, phone or TV. Just map it as a drive on the terminal/computers and you should be fine in long term, for archiving anime. Make sure to get t least one with 2 internal HDD support.

What you could do, in your current situation, is to increase the buffersize. Just increase the buffersize in the Haali Splitter. However i don't think both Haali splitter and MPC-(HC) were coded to deal with it properly. Increasing the buffersize means that it will take some time to run the video, since more data will be cached before playback starts, so don't worry, unless it crashes.
Alternatively try mplayer or vlc.
Try and see if any of those solution works.
And I assume you mapped your anime in a folder as a network drive, if not, do it.

My "G" network runs at about 2.5 megabit/sec at full speed. That more than ten times your 200 kbit speed. You've got something running there that's eating your bandwidth.

200kb/s is complete garbage for a local area network

i don't know how you stand waiting 20sec for a video to load.. that's unacceptable

if i were you, i'd ditch that repeater (if indeed that's the culprit) and get power line network (since you've obviously ruled out running a super long lan cable)