I got my PowerlineHD equipment today – its certainly not Gigabit, but iperf reports around 90mbps and NFS transfers go at about 6MBytes/sec, so faster than 54G wifi can manage, and fast enough to stream SD video for sure (not tried HD yet).

The one downside is that it seems to be interfering with the radio in the kitchen, although the wireless keyboards and Bluetooth headset and phones are fine.

I wasted most of this evening trying to figure out why I can get no sound via the HDMI cable from the nettop to the TV when running Fedora14 (or Ubuntu 10.10) but it works fine in Windows7.

It turns out that Linux sees HDMI audio as a form of SPDIF, so I had to run alsamixer and unmute the three SPDIF channels by pressing ‘M’ or in /etc/rc.local so it survives a reboot:

amixer -c0 -q set 'IEC958',1 unmute

Now the router is downstairs again, the netbook’s wifi signal strength has gone up to 98% which you’d hope for from across the lounge!

Update: I tried streaming a 3.5Gb HD video and it worked fine. There was some tearing of the video which was fixed by disabling Compiz. Its interesting to see CPU usage go from 90% or more down to 15% or less when you switch to VDPAU rendering, thanks NVidia the ION acceleration works great!