You might have tried the following:

• Disabled security on your WiFi network
• Regressed to WEP security
• Told everyone not to use the wireless

Clearly, none of these work-arounds is ideal. There is hope.

The problem is among OS X 10.5 – VMWare Fusion / Parallels Desktop – the TKIP WPA2 security protocol. For some reason, installing the VM programs creates a situation on the wireless network that causes a TKIP MIC (or a “Michael“) message integrity check error. In short: OSX and your router think that the network is being cracked, because of a way that the VM programs use or abuse the networking interface stack.

The solution is to regress the security, but by as little as possible. Simply turn of TKIP or “TKIP+AES” encryption on your wireless device, and only allow AES encryption. This is not ideal, because the Michael check is trying to warn you about network intrusion, however, it simply does not work.

Caveat: if you find that AES encryption does not work on some devices, you are probably use the stock Linksys firmware on your router. Consider upgrading to the DD-WRT firmware. Read the docs, go over notes for your router model, and take the plunge. The stable Linux-based environment for your router will make your network work, as well as offering you more features, such as local DNS, for example.

So, what’s the deal with MPEG4 streaming?

I’ve tried a virtual cornucopia of tools to transcode to MPEG4 as well as package and hint the MPEG4 files. The list includes:

• ffmpeg
• QuickTime Player export functionality
• MPEG4IP tools
• GPAC tools
• mplayer / mencoder

Creating an MPEG4 video track and an MPEG4 audio track inside an MPEG4 container has always been fairly straight forward. Generating this type of file from ffmpeg results in a playable video file, and more importantly, playable in all players I’ve ever tried.

The issue at hand is correctly adding hint tracks to the MPEG4 container. MPEG4IP tools, especially the notable “mp4creator” seems to work just fine for the video track, but SEGFAULTs when trying to hint the audio track. I probably need to read up a lot more on MPEG4 containers, but at the moment, I’m confused if the tracks need to be interleaved or not; part of me thinks they must, as files (encoded as above) I’ve streamed from RS have played just fine in VLC, but fail to have audio in QT. Inspecting the stream’s info in the QT Player only shows the video track. Very intriguing.

At the moment, I’m trying a new set of MPEG4 tools, this time from the GPAC project. I’ll report back, when — not if! — things are working.

If you’re at my blog here, you probably run some GNU / Linux distro. Just a guess.

If you’re running a GNU / Linux distro, there’s a good chance you installed the binary ATI drivers and associated tools, even though it makes your soul bleed.

So, if you have ati-config you can do the following:

Once you get the number to use, likely same as above with ‘1′, you can do

You can also use --effective=startup to have this saved in your X config file. Personally, I like to be able to change it on the fly.

Read about the install process, configuration files, and my general experiences.