How fast does your network have to be to stream 1080p videos smoothly?

I run gigabit and it's smooth for me. Considering gigabit hardware is almost exactly the same cost as old 100meg you might as well. I mean it may cost like $40 for a new switch switch but that's about it.

Also, just double check your motherboard builtin NIC, it may be gigabit already, if not that's another $25ish for a network adapter.

Are these clips being transcoded? If so, are you sure its your network and not your PC? With all the recent talk of transcoding due to the 1.8 release I am AMAZED at the lack of posts that include what may be the most important things.. processor speed and ram.

I havnt played with it much yet, but one example I found is on the TVersity site they recommend a minimum P4 2.8ghz with Hyper Threading and 512 ram for SD and a dual core system with 1gb ram for HD.

this may not apply in your case, but I think a lot of peope are overlooking this.

Wireless does not have enough bandwidth to stream 1080p. A Gig network should handle it.

Actually 100Mb should be enough to handle it. Bluray specs only allow bandwidth of up to ~50Mb.

However, 100Mb could be a problem is your streaming several things over the network at the same time.

I think that wireless if your problem. It doesn't have enough bandwidth.

The Ps3 wired adapters isn't gigabit (IIRC) so a gigabit network wont do anything for it.

I am begining to think i should have prewired my house with CAT6 when i built it...

Oh well once 802.11n get solid...we will be ok.

Last week I threw up my hands and went all wired to my PC and devices. I share a home which belongs to my housemate and was using her 11G router to connect the stuff in my room to the net (PS3, Xbox 360, TiVo Series 3 and my notebook). I got interested in streaming video when they added new codec support for the Xbox and new streaming support for the PS3. I'd been trying to stream 1080p and 720p AVC clips (mostly taken from Apple's QuickTime Guide site), which wouldn't work well at the maximum rate that I was getting from 802.11G. So I asked my housemate whether she wouldn't mind if I moved the cable modem and router from her room into mine--she only has a notebook on the net, used wireless. Now that I've done that I'm getting 12-15Mbps downloads from the net from some sites and who knows how fast transfers are going across my LAN (I also learned a vital lesson about the importance of CAT6 versus CAT5e cabling in 100MHz and GHz wired networking--replacing a CAT5e cable with CAT6 tripled my network download rate--I was maxing out at about 4.5Mbps using a CAT5e cable between my PC and router.

1080p clips run great across my wired LAN, both to the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

On the PS3, you can tell whether you're getting a transcoding or not by selecting an item that you know is stored as HD with the triangle key and looking at the information for the file. It will tell you what the resolution is--it's a clue when it's 400-something by 300-something . I set up TVersity to not trancode to reduce resolution, which it does by default.

Me personally don't have any outputs on my PC to hook to my TV so my PS3 is my media hub via HDMI.

Also wired doesnt mean close. It can be as far as you want. My wired network PC is about 100 feet from my wired PS3 and TV.

I'm working on my setup now. I can't wait.

The wireless adapter that MS sells for the Xbox 360 is 11g & 11a. MS says that the only way to stream HD reliably over wireless is on 11a. Both 11g & 11a are 54mbps, but I guess 11a gets closer to that theoretical number.

Obviously they recommend wired ethernet for the best performance. 100 mbps ethernet is more than fast enough for stutter free HD streaming.

My television is a 46" 1080p Mitsubishi LCD panel (LT-46231) and I'm using it as a screen for my PC (a laptop) as I type this. My PC is a 1.8 MHz 64-bit AMD mobile processor with 1 GB of memory and doesn't have the strength to decode 1080p AVC without dropping many frames. Also, the only HD video output from my laptop VGA, which I connect with an adapter cable to the television's DVI-I connector. The maxiamum resolution that I can get from the television through that is 720p--it won't do 1080p over anything other than HDMI, though it will do 1080i over component for the Xbox, which the television does a good job of de-interlacing. So if I want to see 1080 clips in 1080, I have to use one of the consoles or the other.

In any case, many people have homes wired for LAN throughout. Many builders have been putting it in new homes as a matter of course for the past several years.

Cat5e/Cat6 can reliably run up to 100 meters (320+ feet). HDMI will certainly not run that far.

I have a 100mbit LAN (max runs are about 25 feet of CAT6) and can stream everything I've tried so far without hitches. I've thought about getting a gigabit router but I haven't found any that gets good reviews... My 100mbit Linksys is rock solid, and I use it mostly for sharing Inet access (100mbit, and more like 30mbit max in use).

There might be a cheaper way for you guys to get the speeds you need for streaming hd..Power-line adapters.. I do not know alot about them but apparently they are almost as good as wireless n as far as speeds are concerned. They transmit the data through your homes electrical power lines. They would need a power outlet at the router.. and one at the ps3. It would be about $140.00 for 2 power line adapters.D-link, Linksys, and Netgear all make these adapters. I do not know if these devices will work with the ps3 but maybe someone may want to try it..if they really would like to stream hd content to the ps3.. from any location in your home.

Wireless is worthless for HD streaming. I can't even stream a 15mbps 720P video over wireless without it breaking up and pausing every 2 seconds. If you can do it, wired is the way to go.

I have to second what TwinTurboZX says. The problem with wireless networking is that it is inherently half-duplex, and what's worse is that you're sharing the radio frequencies with Bluetooth controllers and headsets, most cordless phones, all the other wireless network devices in your house, and all the wireless network devices in your neighbors' houses.

In a half-duplex network, when you reach about 30-35% utilization, you start having a high enough rate of packet collisions that more data makes the network get slower instead of faster. The wired standards adopted full-duplex and switching to overcome this problem, but wireless fundamentally can't do either of those. The best wireless can do is keep increasing the bitrates. (And increases in frequencies tend to be accompanied by decreases in effective distance, due to the power requirements, but that's another issue.)

When you consider that your 802.11G network runs at 54Mbps under ideal conditions, any interference you have chips away at that number. It's not hard at all in the real world to whittle it down to below the magic 19.2 Mbps figure for HD ATSC broadcasts, let alone high-bitrate 1080p24 content.

Your only real hope is eliminating the interference: have no other wireless devices working at the time, and hopefully there's not "too much" interference from intervening walls in between. (And it's not like you can easily use the PS3 without a BlueTooth controller being active at the same time!)

IMO, this whole streaming thing is the line in the sand where wired will cut it and wireless won't. Or at best it will always be a little bit troublesome.

--Dwayne

So is it possible that in a future update Sony could add buffering to the video playback? I wouldn't mind giving it a 3 or 4 minute headstart before it starts displaying. The hard drive is there to be used. I'm not an expert on video streaming so there may be a flaw in my plan, but the only way I can get a wired network connection to my PS3 involves many holes in the walls (which would eventually have to be repaired).

I have no problem streaming 1080p quality video from one computer to another computer on the network through my $5 compusa router. Even wireless, there is 54 Mbps of bandwidth, and assuming your card is at at least that, that's more than enough to stream 1080p videos that are in the 20 Mbps range.

It's not so much bandwidth and that 54Mbps is a peak number for wireless g and a--the sustainable average rate of 11g is typically 19 Mbps (23 Mbps for 11a). The problem for video streaming through wireless is latency--it can be very high at various instances and highly unpredictable. Between a, b and g, the latency problem is smallest in 11a which is why it's the standard where media streaming works best. I'm not sure about 11n--one hopes that there's been a major improvement there.

For best quality... I add the files onto the internal PS3 drive. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, streaming is more convenient... but you don't have to bother with latency issues.

unsupported formats have to be transcoded and streamed tho, and also the ps3 using fat32 file system cannot recognize anything over 4 gigs.

I've been running a gigabit network over Cat5e for six years now at home with no problems.

Indeed, which is why it's such a shame for us Mac users that we have to install windoze on our machines in order to have a true transcoding-and-streaming-in-one program. *sigh* Why oh why can't Sony license the divx file format and allow NTFS formatting? Honestly, Fat32 is so old school

A little off topic maybe.

I think I am going to go to a wired network soon. I figure I will need a gigabit card for my computer (instead of the 10/100), a gigabit/wireless N-router nearby. I plan on running a single network cable from my office - where the computer and router will be - to my family room/HT.

I have multiple devices in my HT using the network - PS3, HD DVD player, DirecTV HR20, maybe more in the future. Question is - what device do I need to provide the multiple network connections? Is a simple gigabit ethernet switch adequate at this end? Could I simply put a gigabit switch on each end if I forego wireless entirely? I am currently using the Buffalo ethernet converter to provide network connections to my HT.

DLink DGL-4300 (4 Gb ports/ 108 Mb wireless thru turbo mode)

What is the best software for streaming to the xbox x360 (linux/windows)?
I have .ISO, .xvid, .mkv, .wmv .mp4 .avi and .m4a files, and which ones stream the best surround sound?