Streaming HD Video over Wireless N

[quasi51]

Long time lurker...I've benefited a lot from these forums but I'm stumped on this one so I thought I'd join to share my dilemma. I hope this hasn't been covered elsewhere, I tried a search but couldn't find anything.

I'm trying to stream 720p/1080p across a wireless network. The computer storing the media is hardwired gigabit to the router (WRT-600n). The laptop is running an Intel 5300, 802.11n, 40mhz Wide on the 5Ghz channel. I can consistently transfer files from the storage machine to the laptop over the wireless at roughly 100mbps(12-13MBps). The receiving laptop playing the media is a T9800 Core 2 at 2.93Ghz with a Nvidia FX3600 video card and 4gb of ram. I'm running windows 7 x64 and have tried using MPC-HC (mplayer, VLC, WMP) with FFDShow DXVA and/or CoreAVC.

Streams 720p/1080p up to around 5mbps seem to play fine. However, once the bitrate reaches 8-12mbps everything gets choppy.

My suspicion is that MPC-HC employs a "just in time" approach to streaming and just cuts it too close. I'd like to tell MPC-HC to buffer more data so that small network dropouts don't cause stuttering in the movie. I can't seem to find an option in MPC-HC to increase the buffer. Is that available?

Of course, I could be wrong and this may not be the problem. I'd appreciate some feedback on why streaming higher bitrate content wirelessly is so difficult when there appears to be lots of bandwidth and processing power. It just doesn't seem to make any sense. Particularly with DXVA, decoding these streams no longer poses a significant challenge to hardware, and I have 100mbps available...so what's the problem?

Everywhere I read on the internet, I just find blanket statements that 1080p over wireless just isn't possible. What I want to know is why. Has anyone had success streaming high bitrate content over wireless? I'm open to trying any combination of player/decoder/renderer/etc.

Thanks in advance for any help!:thanks:

[Dark Shikari]

Everywhere I read on the internet, I just find blanket statements that 1080p over wireless just isn't possible. What I want to know is why.Because people are incompetent.

[scharfis_brain]

tcp streams should play fine as long as the achieved true data throughput via Wireless is more than your video stream's datarate.

udp streams (ie. Multicast) don't play fine, because wireless looses too many packets during transmission.

[Reimar]

MPlayer has the -cache and -cache-min options. By choosing the right combination you can play almost any media over any kind of connection, however possibly at the cost of a large initial buffering time.
In the past I've used things like -cache 81920 -cache-min 0.5 which makes it read 400kB before starting playback and caching up to 80 MB, if the initial cache wasn't enough you can just pause playback in the middle for a while to let it fill up the cache.
Of course that's only how I like to handle it, there are other options, and if someone cared enough to implement it, it sure would be possible to automate this more...

[ranpha]

Streaming high-bitrate HD videos via wireless N is easily done. In my network, there are no problem streaming Blu-ray videos that I directly rip (no reencode) to my laptop (MPC-HC + CoreAVC). Then again, my wireless network has roughly 3 times your network throughput. If you use WPA2/WPA, can you try disabling it and see if performance improves?

[quasi51]

Thanks for the feedback,

@scharfis_brain -- What do you recommend to stream via TCP? I'm assuming that this is done via some kind of media serving software. Currently I'm just browsing through the windows network interface to the target machine and opening the movie in MPC-HC.

@Reimar I'll give Mplayer a try and see how it goes. Are cache/cache-min options that I can fill in somewhere in the GUI or do they have to be added as switch under the advanced options?

@Ranpha -- I'm curious about your wireless network. When I quoted 100mbps as my throughput I meant it as the actual transfer rates I get, not the link speed. My network cards connect at 300mbps but I've never heard of anyone actually transferring at 100% of that rate. Do you mean to say that you get 300mbps of actual throughput? Either way, 100mpbs is 10x what I actually need to stream the movie. But, it's nice to hear that it works for someone. I'll give it a shot with WPA2-AES off.

:thanks:

[scharfis_brain]

@scharfis_brain -- What do you recommend to stream via TCP? I'm assuming that this is done via some kind of media serving software. Currently I'm just browsing through the windows network interface to the target machine and opening the movie in MPC-HC.

Opening files via Windows file shares uses TCP for data transmission.

UDP usually is being used for real time streaming and voice over IP telephone services.

[ranpha]

Thanks for the feedback,

@Ranpha -- I'm curious about your wireless network. When I quoted 100mbps as my throughput I meant it as the actual transfer rates I get, not the link speed. My network cards connect at 300mbps but I've never heard of anyone actually transferring at 100% of that rate. Do you mean to say that you get 300mbps of actual throughput? Either way, 100mpbs is 10x what I actually need to stream the movie. But, it's nice to hear that it works for someone. I'll give it a shot with WPA2-AES off.

:thanks:

That's with an ASUS router with an ASUS dongle though, so my case is not typical. If I were to use the built-in Intel wireless chipset, the speed will be halved.