[PS3] PS3 Streaming over WiFi

With the latest firmware, doing some googling I've seen some reporting of high-def mpeg videos stuttering while streaming.

PS3MS says the buffer is full throughout playback but the stuttering is constant. The PS3 reports it's trying to run 100Mbps which I honestly think is total horse-shit. (MPEG2 Video). Realize, on G at 54Mbps (unrealistic sustained velocity), you could stream 23.73GB/hr. Considering my 1080p AAC/MPEG2 movies are around 12GB and are 90+ minutes in length, it wouldn't even require half of this bandwidth to stream the entire content. And 100Mbps might be the playback rate but what's causing this stuttering?

If I pause the video momentarily then hit play, it plays smoothly for a few seconds then goes back to stuttering. This seems to indicate the system isn't buffering high def videos correctly like people have reported. I'll try with a wired connection to achieve above 50Mbps throughput and see if that alleviates the issue.

Anyone here find a workaround or something to fix the issue other than copying the files to the actual PS3 then watching them from there?

Sorry to go off topic, but do you experience issues with your Music as well? I have an issue where intermittently it will stop playing a song, in the middle of the song.

To assist you, have you ensured you're router is up to date with the latest firmware? Have you tried googling <your router name> ps3 stream or something of the such?

-Kyle

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Originally Posted by Kyle

Sorry to go off topic, but do you experience issues with your Music as well? I have an issue where intermittently it will stop playing a song, in the middle of the song.

To assist you, have you ensured you're router is up to date with the latest firmware? Have you tried googling <your router name> ps3 stream or something of the such?

-Kyle

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I haven't tried music but as the bitrate there will unlikely exceed 320Kbps, I doubt it'll be much of an issue. I'll try it when I get back home.

The router I have is a brand new Netgear N150 Wireless Router running the latest firmware. PS3s have only G capability, though. If the readout on the screen at 100Mbps is correct in some places, it makes sense that the system would be stuttering every second or so since the max G can provide is roughly 50Mbps. I've read the PS3s are having issues streaming any MPEG encoded video over wireless, but particularly with high resolution images. Everything seems to point to a very poor buffering system, it wants to try to stream everything half a second away from it being rendered on the screen which results in bandwidths required that may exceed G's capability.

I'll try it again from a wired connection through the router and then again from a wired connection through a switch monitoring the ports with SNMP to see the throughput.

It really wouldn't strike me as odd if Sony did it intentionally to try to coerce people to go buy blu-rays for high def movies or to buy/rent them in the PS3 store.

Rather, as a programmer, the issue seems that their buffer has a fixed width regardless of media, and that the rendering of MPEG is different than AVI in that the buffer is being filled with decoded output rather than encoded, since an entire AVI file of ~800-900 MB can fit with no problem but a 5GB MKV file with MPEG encoded video stutters and uses more than 150x the datarate (despite only being 5x the size). So while a low definition AVI of mine (roughly 900 MB) streams entirely into the buffer in less than a minute, to the point where my PS media server is no longer serving any data to the PS3, a very high definition movie cannot fill this fixed sized buffer quickly enough to keep up with raw output. The buffer should be dynamic based on bitrates, media type, or user specification. It might come down to using a different operating system on the PS3 with better software.

I played with the settings in the server a bit and found a really nice combo of decoding settings that produces ~15Mbps steady playback on 1080p and looks almost lossless on my screen. There are some scenes where almost every pixel on the screen constantly changes, in no real pattern you'd discern in an algorithm, and at those points the bitrate jumps to > 100Mbps, but that's expected given that MPEG2 can't compress data like that.

Most scenes run flawlessly now, except ones where the above situation happens. Music at the highest quality CBR I have (including FLAC songs) play without any hiccups at all (it's really low bandwidth comparatively). I'm thinking about installing linux on the box and writing something that will decode more on the PS3 and grabbing a bigger buffer so I can buffer for about 5-15 seconds of playback depending on a continuous bitrate average, and offloading a lot of the decoding to the PS3 (which is uber powerful itself...) would let me stream full quality 99.9+% lossless video over wire under 10Mbps.

I've not had a problem playing my movies from PC -> PS3. Just have them set up in a share folder with media sharing turned on and PS3 plays them all flawlessly...