TV Streaming over wireless (1 Viewer)

[trentos]

Hi there

I recently set up a MediaPortal server which I'm using to stream TV to my laptop over Wireless-N. However the streaming is quite choppy and I get frequent 1/2s pauses. Of course I initially assumed the wireless throughput was insufficient, however it appears to only need 1MB/s maximum. I can transfer files over wireless much faster than this (consistently 5MB or higher. Just now I was getting 10MB/s)

Now the crazy thing is I think my streaming performance actually *increased* when I started a large file transfer over wireless while simultaneously streaming TV. Windows Resource Monitor showed MediaPortal as using ~800KB/s and the file transfer as 8MB/s. All the short pauses disappeared while transferring the file, and they came back again when the file transfer stopped.

Is it at all possible that my laptop's wireless card is configured to slow down when the bandwidth requirements are lower, causing the poor streaming performance when MediaPortal is the only source of traffic?
Is it possible that the pausing is unrelated to wireless performance at all?

 

[mm1352000]

Hi and welcome trentos

Is it at all possible that my laptop's wireless card is configured to slow down when the bandwidth requirements are lower, causing the poor streaming performance when MediaPortal is the only source of traffic?

Absolutely! Faster networking uses more power. It is common for laptops to throttle network speed to save power. Perhaps try plugging in the laptop and temporarily switching to an "I don't care about the power usage" power profile.

mm

 

[cabbaze]

Hi there

I recently set up a MediaPortal server which I'm using to stream TV to my laptop over Wireless-N. However the streaming is quite choppy and I get frequent 1/2s pauses. Of course I initially assumed the wireless throughput was insufficient, however it appears to only need 1MB/s maximum. I can transfer files over wireless much faster than this (consistently 5MB or higher. Just now I was getting 10MB/s)

Now the crazy thing is I think my streaming performance actually *increased* when I started a large file transfer over wireless while simultaneously streaming TV. Windows Resource Monitor showed MediaPortal as using ~800KB/s and the file transfer as 8MB/s. All the short pauses disappeared while transferring the file, and they came back again when the file transfer stopped.

Is it at all possible that my laptop's wireless card is configured to slow down when the bandwidth requirements are lower, causing the poor streaming performance when MediaPortal is the only source of traffic?
Is it possible that the pausing is unrelated to wireless performance at all?

how do you set up mediaportal to do this? ,im wanting to do the same thing ,thanks

 

[trentos]

Hi there

I recently set up a MediaPortal server which I'm using to stream TV to my laptop over Wireless-N. However the streaming is quite choppy and I get frequent 1/2s pauses. Of course I initially assumed the wireless throughput was insufficient, however it appears to only need 1MB/s maximum. I can transfer files over wireless much faster than this (consistently 5MB or higher. Just now I was getting 10MB/s)

Now the crazy thing is I think my streaming performance actually *increased* when I started a large file transfer over wireless while simultaneously streaming TV. Windows Resource Monitor showed MediaPortal as using ~800KB/s and the file transfer as 8MB/s. All the short pauses disappeared while transferring the file, and they came back again when the file transfer stopped.

Is it at all possible that my laptop's wireless card is configured to slow down when the bandwidth requirements are lower, causing the poor streaming performance when MediaPortal is the only source of traffic?
Is it possible that the pausing is unrelated to wireless performance at all?

how do you set up mediaportal to do this? ,im wanting to do the same thing ,thanks

1) Install both the client and server on your PC
2) Run through the prompts to tune the channels, etc.
3) Set the streaming server IP address to your network IP. (Using auto won't work if you have VPNs or other software that creates virtual network interfaces)
4) Install the client on your laptop
5) Edit the client settings and set the server IP to the appropriate value
6) Set the appropriate firewall settings on both client and server (the installer didn't set them correctly for me)
7) Disable IPV6 in your network adaptor settings if it takes an abnormal length of time to tune in to a channel

I have other issues at the moment but I haven't had time to look at it lately. Some of the issues are IMO problems with the software, but I'm pretty happy that I can stream TV to a laptop regardless.

 

[Matthew Houston]

It might not just be the overall throughput but depending on the quality of your wireless connection it can be dropping a LOT of packets. Your overall data throughput is not effected as the packets just get re-sent but a few dropped packets in a row could possibly break the stream enough to cause a skip... I'm not really up to speed on what type of streaming MP does, I'm a recent convert

Try streaming it with the laptop right next to the Wireless AP and see how that goes.

 

[msj33]

It is also my experience, that a LOt of packages is lost on Wireless.

Can someone comfirm, that jthis is due to UDP traffic? That explains, why performance is bad.

If the RTSP traffic is on TCP, then I guess its the TS writer/reader coding that is causing the lags.

Overall I do think that wireless performance is VERY bad, and even on a wired connection i'm not satisfied.

Best and most stable performance is surely in a single eat setup!

I hope to see better performance on this.........maybe one day we can dream of a stable wireless performance.

/Morten

 

[Matthew Houston]

Could it also be that as it's 'live' there is no (or little) buffering taking place? That would definitely contribute to it.