# Streaming and whether (and how) to setup Moca



## BHyde (Dec 14, 2003)

I am trying to make multi-room streaming work with an Elite and a Premiere XL. When I first got the elite, I set it up next to the premiere. I used a sling turbo over my electrical outlets to connect them to the network. Sitting right next to each other and using the same sling turbo, MRS went smoothly. When I moved the XL upstairs, however, MRS stuttered and was unusable - looking and acting just like I was trying to watch a program during a transfer using multi-room viewing. FYI - I did do a MRV transfer and TIVo says transfer speed of 11.7 MBS.

SO - I am trying to figure out whether and how to use Moca. 

The diagrams on the Tivo website make it look like I would need to run a coaxial cable from my cable modem to a MOCA bridge. 

Is that correct? My cable modem has only one coaxial input - for cable coming into the modem. (I am using a cable modem from Comcast that also provides our telephone service.) Does that mean I can't go the Moca route?

If Moca is a no-go, has anyone had success using the power line products that promise 500 mbps throughput?

My home configuration: 

1. Cable and telephone wires enter an Arris TM702G/CT "Touchstone Telephony Modem."

2. Ethernet cable runs from Arris modem to Apple Time Capsule, which (1) sends wireless throughout house (bolstered by a second Time Capsule downstairs and an Apple Airport extreme in a bedroom next to where modem is located) and (2) has an ethernet cable running to a Slinglink Turbo plugged into electrical outlet.

3. Elite and Premiere XL are connected to network via slinglink turbos in their respective rooms.

Anyone have any ideas?


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## andyf (Feb 23, 2000)

I just did what you want to do. With Apple Time Capsule and Airport Expresses.

I used the Actiontec Moca Adapters. They have a Coax In, Coax Out, and RJ45 Ethernet sockets.

Get an adapter for your TimeCapsule and one for your Premiere.

Take the coax cable that goes into your telephony modem and put it to the Coax In on the adapter.

Connect the output labelled STB (Standalone Box) on the adapter to your telephony modem.

Connect the ethernet on the adapter to a port on the Time Capsule.

Similarly connect the Premier. Coax from the wall to Coax in on the adapter and STB to cable in on the Premier. Ethernet from Premier to ethernet on the adapter.

It's actually quite simple and works very well.

Change Network Settings on the Elite to MoCa. you should remove the ethernet cable from the Elite.


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## BHyde (Dec 14, 2003)

andyf said:


> I just did what you want to do. With Apple Time Capsule and Airport Expresses.
> 
> I used the Actiontec Moca Adapters. They have a Coax In, Coax Out, and RJ45 Ethernet sockets.
> 
> ...


You make it sound simply, but one question - the ethernet cable from the Moca adapter, does it connect to the in-coming ethernet port on the Time Capsule, which until now has been connected to the telephony modem? (In other words, I would no longer have an ethernet connection directly between the Time Capsule and the modem?)


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

BHyde said:


> I am trying to make multi-room streaming work with an Elite and a Premiere XL. When I first got the elite, I set it up next to the premiere. I used a sling turbo over my electrical outlets to connect them to the network. Sitting right next to each other and using the same sling turbo, MRS went smoothly. When I moved the XL upstairs, however, MRS stuttered and was unusable - looking and acting just like I was trying to watch a program during a transfer using multi-room viewing. FYI - I did do a MRV transfer and TIVo says transfer speed of 11.7 MBS.
> 
> SO - I am trying to figure out whether and how to use Moca.


I've never used MoCA, and I've never used a Sling unit, but I have used power-line network adapters. It might help to make sure that the upstairs unit is plugged into an outlet on the same "leg" of your electrical service as the downstairs unit.


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## Leon WIlkinson (Feb 13, 2000)

BHyde said:


> You make it sound simply, but one question - the ethernet cable from the Moca adapter, does it connect to the in-coming ethernet port on the Time Capsule, which until now has been connected to the telephony modem? (In other words, I would no longer have an ethernet connection directly between the Time Capsule and the modem?)


The MoCA to me is just like connecting anything to a switch/router which just looking at the a Pic of the Time Capsule is









Now you have a Ethernet cable on the far left, going to the modem?

If the above is true. Your MoCA would connect to any of the other connections for access to you Network. The MoCA Cable out does not have to be used at all( it is just a pass thru splitter) so you can split it before the MoCA if you wanted.

To me a MoCA is basically just a Ethernet to Coax Adapter. So the needed connections on the MoCA is Cable In and the Ethernet out (with one MoCA going to a router on your network).


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## andyf (Feb 23, 2000)

BHyde said:


> You make it sound simply, but one question - the ethernet cable from the Moca adapter, does it connect to the in-coming ethernet port on the Time Capsule, which until now has been connected to the telephony modem? (In other words, I would no longer have an ethernet connection directly between the Time Capsule and the modem?)


No. You leave the ethernet between the telephony modem and the incoming port on the TimeCapsule. You use the ethernet on the Moca adapter to connect to one of the other three ports on the Time Capsule.

This gives your TiVos which are now on MoCa access to the internet via your telephony modem.


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## BHyde (Dec 14, 2003)

andyf said:


> No. You leave the ethernet between the telephony modem and the incoming port on the TimeCapsule. You use the ethernet on the Moca adapter to connect to one of the other three ports on the Time Capsule.
> 
> This gives your TiVos which are now on MoCa access to the internet via your telephony modem.


Thanks, and I'll give it a shot.

I have a bit of a complication that I hope I can solve. When the house was built, the walls in certain rooms had coaxial outlets, but later on, to add cable to another room, the cable company just brought another cable wire from the pole to my house for the cable for that room. All that happened awhile ago and I can no longer remember which coaxial outlets were the original ones and which ones were added later. So some coaxial outlets are on one set of wires from one outside source, and others are on other wires from the other outside source. The room with the cable modem has no coaxial outlet, but some coaxial cable I've strung through the walls. For Moca to a be successful, I'm assuming I'll have to use coax cable that is on the same coaxial wiring for the bridge and both Tivos. I'll just have to find some. But this is what makes life interesting!


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## xberk (Dec 3, 2011)

andyf said:


> I just did what you want to do. With Apple Time Capsule and Airport Expresses.
> 
> I used the Actiontec Moca Adapters. They have a Coax In, Coax Out, and RJ45 Ethernet sockets.
> 
> ...


Alternative to the Actiontec MoCa adapters is the Netgear. Way less money for Netgear. Many of us here are using the Netgear with great success. I believe it's the same spec as the Actiontec. They also come in pairs like the Actiontec. I have no problems with the Netgear!

http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-MCAB1001-Coax-Ethernet-Adapter-Black/dp/B001N85NMI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328414152&sr=8-1


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## xberk (Dec 3, 2011)

BHyde said:


> Thanks, and I'll give it a shot.
> 
> I have a bit of a complication that I hope I can solve. When the house was built, the walls in certain rooms had coaxial outlets, but later on, to add cable to another room, the cable company just brought another cable wire from the pole to my house for the cable for that room. All that happened awhile ago and I can no longer remember which coaxial outlets were the original ones and which ones were added later. So some coaxial outlets are on one set of wires from one outside source, and others are on other wires from the other outside source. The room with the cable modem has no coaxial outlet, but some coaxial cable I've strung through the walls. For Moca to a be successful, I'm assuming I'll have to use coax cable that is on the same coaxial wiring for the bridge and both Tivos. I'll just have to find some. But this is what makes life interesting!


I believe the MoCa will still work. The idea of using the Coax is that the Coax provides a wired network without running new wires. If the cable guys added outlets to the house later, they are still feeding it from a splitter coming off the main cable line to the house. It will all loop through via the MoCa signal. I'm not expert .. but I'd say the MoCA signal will show up on all the coax outlets in your house. You just need a MoCA adapter at your cable modem and router location (should be the same), and at each of the locations for your TIVOs. One pair should do for you since your Elite has MoCA built into it. ... But as I said, I'm no expert.


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## BHyde (Dec 14, 2003)

andyf said:


> No. You leave the ethernet between the telephony modem and the incoming port on the TimeCapsule. You use the ethernet on the Moca adapter to connect to one of the other three ports on the Time Capsule.
> 
> This gives your TiVos which are now on MoCa access to the internet via your telephony modem.


I want to thank you again. Today I received the two Actiontek Moca adapters being sold together that I had ordered from Amazon, followed your simple instructions, and VOILA! MRS is working ever so smoothly.

The only thing left out of your instructions was the need to plug the Moca adapters into an outlet, but that was a rather obvious step once I got them.

So thank you. Hope this Moca connectivity works just as simply for everyone else.


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## andyf (Feb 23, 2000)

Nice.


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## fyodor (Sep 19, 2006)

It saddens me to see so many people wasting large amounts of time with complicated wireless bridge setups when MoCA works so well out of the box for virtually everyone.


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

fyodor said:


> It saddens me to see so many people wasting large amounts of time with complicated wireless bridge setups when MoCA works so well out of the box for virtually everyone.


I'll second that. MoCa was much easier than dealing with a wireless bridge. It's much more reliable.


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## premiereman (Aug 18, 2011)

I had wireless G adapters and the 54mbps connection to each of my TiVo's wasn't solid enough to handle MR Streaming. I upgraded to TiVo's wireless N adapters and now get a 240-300mbps connection via the 5ghz band and have no streaming issues. What is the maximum throughput with MoCA? I thought about it and don't see a need/advantage to switch over to MoCA since I have a solid wireless N connection to my base router (Time Capsule) w/o a need for a bridge. Someone correct me if I'm wrong


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## andyf (Feb 23, 2000)

TiVo Wireless 'N' adapters are better than the general 'N' adapter because they have special firmware that allows them to create a point to point connection rather than going through the router, similar to the way MoCa does. However, I have seen alot of traffic on the network with these adapters due to their constant "chattering" to each other. If you are getting good results then there's no reason to change.


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## fyodor (Sep 19, 2006)

premiereman said:


> I had wireless G adapters and the 54mbps connection to each of my TiVo's wasn't solid enough to handle MR Streaming. I upgraded to TiVo's wireless N adapters and now get a 240-300mbps connection via the 5ghz band and have no streaming issues. What is the maximum throughput with MoCA? I thought about it and don't see a need/advantage to switch over to MoCA since I have a solid wireless N connection to my base router (Time Capsule) w/o a need for a bridge. Someone correct me if I'm wrong


The wireless speed your are seeing is the radio bitrate with error coding and correction, not the actual data rate. That is why your "54 mbps" wireless G network couldn't stream 15 mbps ATSC television programming.

That being said, wireless N works well for many people and that's great for them. But a lot of people have trouble, either due to interference or relative antenna placement. And those people end up wasting huge amounts of time on configuration and shuffling of hardware. And it's worse if you have multiple devices accessing the wireless network.Whereas MoCA works stably and quickly for virtually everyone.


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

premiereman said:


> I had wireless G adapters and the 54mbps connection to each of my TiVo's wasn't solid enough to handle MR Streaming. I upgraded to TiVo's wireless N adapters and now get a 240-300mbps connection via the 5ghz band and have no streaming issues. What is the maximum throughput with MoCA? I thought about it and don't see a need/advantage to switch over to MoCA since I have a solid wireless N connection to my base router (Time Capsule) w/o a need for a bridge. Someone correct me if I'm wrong


If your setup is working for you, then I wouldn't change a thing. What we mostly see on this board are people who have connection problems. Since I setup my MoCa network, my solution is always to advise them to switch to MoCa.


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## leifgate (Mar 6, 2012)

Just a general note on MoCA - I got mine working this weekend, but only after installing a Point of Entry (MoCA POE) filter in front of the cable coming into my house (before all splitters). Before that, connections among the MoCA boxes were working inconsistently. Comcast wouldn't do this for me because they're not deploying MoCA devices of their own in our area yet, but they didn't warn me off putting it on myself (I think they understood that the POE filter protects other customers in the area as much as it improves my in-house MoCA signal). I bought the POE filter from TiVo - didn't see them on Amazon.

Once this was done, I was finally able to get the "Enable MoCA?" prompt to come up on my Elite during a "Repeat Guided Setup" session, but only after first establishing a working ethernet connection (which I disconnected once MoCA was running); until that, I just kept getting "does not recognize your adapter" type messages. This suggests something a bit flaky in the menus/prompts, so it might take you a few tries, but it's worked fine once established.


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

leifgate said:


> Comcast wouldn't do this for me because they're not deploying MoCA devices of their own in our area yet


Is Comcast using MoCa devices in any area?


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## lavajunk (Oct 6, 2005)

andyf said:


> TiVo Wireless 'N' adapters are better than the general 'N' adapter because they have special firmware that allows them to create a point to point connection rather than going through the router, similar to the way MoCa does. However, I have seen alot of traffic on the network with these adapters due to their constant "chattering" to each other. If you are getting good results then there's no reason to change.


I'm a little confused on with MoCA and what I need. I purchased a Tivo Priemere Elite and I'm still waiting for my M-stream cable card and tuning adapter. I already have a HD Tivo. It looks like the new Elite is connected to MoCA via my cable - Coax line - no issues. Does that mean I don't need my Tivo wireless adaptor for that Tivo box? Also can I stream to and from my Elite to my Tivo HD? If so should I set MoCA up on the Tivo HD - whats the advantavges/disadvantages over using a Tivo Wireless Adaptor (just bought a N for the new Tivo - may not need it). If I wanted to take advantage of MoCA on my TIVO HD - can I and what would I need. I currently have a wireless dual band router, could I need to connect something to my router as well as my Coax that current connects to my TIVO HD?

As you can tell I'm a bit confused about what I need or don't for to have a MoCA set up and if I did what I really can - any advise is appreaciated!!

Thanks!


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## Brighton Line (Mar 15, 2006)

lavajunk said:


> I'm a little confused on with MoCA


MOCA is all wired, you do not need a wireless adapter. CoAx for the signal between MOCA router and Ethernet from moca to your Tivo thru Ethernet port.

The Tivo N wireless adapter is actually a Bridge in networking terms, it uses the ethernet port and its own power supply not the USB port on the Tivo.

In my setup in my bedroom between the MOCA router and the tivo I put a hub so I have my slingbox and tivo getting a signal via MOCA from the living room where my cable modem/router is.

Of course the speed is less the the max of the MOCA device (270 mbps) since its only a 100mbps hub but I see no difference in picture on each device.

Only the Tivo Elite has MOCA built in, you need a MOCA external device if you have any other Tivo.

What do you think you are missing?


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

aadam101 said:


> I'll second that. MoCa was much easier than dealing with a wireless bridge. It's much more reliable.


They are both very easy to set up and both extremely reliable. And least my Dlink Bridges/APs were extremely easy to setup and extremely reliable. TiVo transfer speeds over the bridge is identical to when connected directly to my gigabit network.

Also you can get by with just one MoCA adapter if you use the wired GigE port on the ELite. When I tried it at home it would work with internet access from the GigE port and then MoCA between teh Elite and one Dlink MoCA adapter(with the 100BT port connected to a TiVo).
Of course it also worked in the reverse with getting Internet from the 100BT port on a Dlink MoCA adapter and MoCA on the Elite while also connecting a TiVo to the GigE port on the Elite.


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## lavajunk (Oct 6, 2005)

So -let me see if I'm understanding it right. 

The MoCA will allow me to stream between my TIVO Elite and my HD Tivos with extra equipment (a MoCA bridge or adaptor) - but I really still need either a hard wired Eithernet or Wireless adaptor or something similar in order to get TIVO updates etc OR a MoCA adaptor on my wireless router (I a bit unsure if I can have MoCA connected to the wireless router part and connect to the network from MoCA connected to a wireless router).

I have my Tivo Elite that has MoCA built in - I just connect my COAX and it has the built in MoCA - no additional equipment required. On my TIVO HD's if I want to stream to/from them and the TIVO Elite, I need a MoCA Brigde (or adaptor not sure the proper name) added between my COAX line and my TIVO HD - and thats it - right no additional equipment on my wireless router. Is this right? 

But to connect to the TIVO network etc - I either need to add another MoCA Bridge (or adaptor or whatever the proper name is) to my wireless router. That way I can stream say Hulu Plus or Netflix or other downloads via MoCA. This will allow all my TIVO's and my network to communicate over MoCA and I won't need the Wireless Adaptors on any of the TIVOS (am I still right?) If I don't have the MoCA adaptor on my wirelss router, I need the TIVO adatpors on each TIVO (for them to connect to the network). 

Do I have it right?

Also from what I've heard there is a new TIVO set top soon to be released kind of a thin client (dummy box) that in the future if I have a TV and no TIVO I can add this new set top box and stream anything via MoCA from my TIVO to the TV withthis new TIVO set top box. Right? 

Thanks again!!


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