New Games Thread

[Kevin M]

I was just going to run an HDMI cable from Nina's laptop to the TV if I ever felt the need.

[cody]

Originally Posted by GusGus91

When watching youtube, is your signal strength good? that will rape your youtube experience on teh ps3 if it sucks.

And download a program called TVersity. It pretty much makes your computer into a media server, and you can watch and listen to almost anything that's on your computer, on your ps3. Do you have vista or XP?

and yea.. The download speeds on ps3 are sloooooooooooowwwww.

Youtube wasn't buffering at all so it was good. I'll check out both TVersity and the one Nick posted. Thanks guys. I have XP Pro on my media server and Vista on my gaming laptop.

[cody]

Originally Posted by Kevin M

I was just going to run an HDMI cable from Nina's laptop to the TV if I ever felt the need.

That gets old...but does work well. I used a DVI to HDMI cable with great results. But you have to run an audio cable too. It's annoying.

[Kevin M]

Not if you have HDMI out built in to the lappy. But to be honest... I still haven't bothered. I use my internets machines for internets and TV machines for TV.

[cody]

Right on.

[sperry]

Originally Posted by cody

That gets old...but does work well. I used a DVI to HDMI cable with great results. But you have to run an audio cable too. It's annoying.

I've got a VGA cable and a headphone jack cable just chillin' tucked behind my TV. Hooking up the laptop is as easy as those two plugs and pressing "View PC" on my Harmony remote. Plus with a bluetooth mouse, you're online pretty easily from the couch with the lappy next to the TV.

It's low tech, but looks great on the 1080p native resolution, and Lisa can watch Ugly Betty or whatever online if the DVR doesn't record it (which happens all the time... my DVR is so buggy it's almost worse than no DVR at all).

[Nick Koan]

Originally Posted by Kevin M

Not if you have HDMI out built in to the lappy. But to be honest... I still haven't bothered. I use my internets machines for internets and TV machines for TV.

Yup, that works too.

The grand vision of the DLNA project is to make it so every TV & stereo & whatever else can stream movies or TV or MP3s from a central media server in your house. Every receiver can have access to everything on that central server.

But yeah, so far I think the PS3 is the only hardware that really supports it, and the server software is still young.

[cody]

Originally Posted by sperry

I've got a VGA cable and a headphone jack cable just chillin' tucked behind my TV. Hooking up the laptop is as easy as those two plugs and pressing "View PC" on my Harmony remote. Plus with a bluetooth mouse, you're online pretty easily from the couch with the lappy next to the TV.

It's low tech, but looks great on the 1080p native resolution, and Lisa can watch Ugly Betty or whatever online if the DVR doesn't record it (which happens all the time... my DVR is so buggy it's almost worse than no DVR at all).

I've got the same setup but with the cable I already mentioned. It certainly does work well, just not something I want to deal with on a daily basis. I looked into wireless solutions and they were way too rich for my blood and didn't support higher than 720i IIRC.

And my DVR is uber buggy too. It does some weird shit that makes no sense and they die all the time even though they're in a ventilated area and I keep the vents clean. That's right, we're on our 4th in a year and a half. I will not let them replace it again. I'll cancel that shit in a second if this one dies...and either it or the external HDD is not working right so I had to disconnect it last night.

[cody]

Originally Posted by Nick Koan

Yup, that works too.

The grand vision of the DLNA project is to make it so every TV & stereo & whatever else can stream movies or TV or MP3s from a central media server in your house. Every receiver can have access to everything on that central server.

But yeah, so far I think the PS3 is the only hardware that really supports it, and the server software is still young.

Any idea what would be better for my purposes? The software you linked earlier or TVersity?

[Nick Koan]

Not a clue. Like I said, I haven't really researched it or even played around with it.

From a quick look at spec sheets, it looks like TVersity will be more like what you need. It also does that spiffy transcoding thing, so you don't have to worry about codecs on the PS3.

[cody]

Okay, thanks.

[Nick Koan]

I thought I edited my post with this link, but it seems lost. Anyway, here it is.

http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=75081

[GusGus91]

okay, since you're using xp for your media, then you will be good. Vista has some trouble with tversity. but there's a way of getting around it. tversity works great actually. i havent tried the other thing though.

[GusGus91]

Originally Posted by cody

I've got the same setup but with the cable I already mentioned. It certainly does work well, just not something I want to deal with on a daily basis. I looked into wireless solutions and they were way too rich for my blood and didn't support higher than 720i IIRC.

And my DVR is uber buggy too. It does some weird shit that makes no sense and they die all the time even though they're in a ventilated area and I keep the vents clean. That's right, we're on our 4th in a year and a half. I will not let them replace it again. I'll cancel that shit in a second if this one dies...and either it or the external HDD is not working right so I had to disconnect it last night.

Yea man, we had the same thing happen to my dvr, and my girlfriends sister's too. You gotta keep that thing an open room so it doesnt kick the bucket. Ever since i brought mine out of the closed area, it has been fine.

[cody]

Maybe I should put my unused notebook cooler under it.

Are you using TVersity over 802.11g? I'm worried 54MBps won't cut it. My router stutters when streaming media via network drive...wonder how it will handle Tversity.

[tysonK]

I use TVersity. I was streaming a 700mb divx from a 5 year old powerpc and it handled it fine...wireless.

I would imagine a 7gb blu-ray might be a little tough to stream.

I was having issues with the wireless losing connection to the PS3, so I hardwired and zero problems now.

It takes about 4.5 minutes to copy a 1.5gb file to my PS3. That is plenty fast enough for me.

[GusGus91]

Originally Posted by cody

Maybe I should put my unused notebook cooler under it.

Are you using TVersity over 802.11g? I'm worried 54MBps won't cut it. My router stutters when streaming media via network drive...wonder how it will handle Tversity.

Yea i am. But sometimes it can get a little chopy and it's super annoying. My friend is running tversity on his ps3 and it runs super smooth... And i dont know why mine is doing this, and his works great. If you figure it out lemme know.

[Dean]

The most common problems with wireless are channel contention and B/G contention.

If you have a client that has a "Site Monitor" mode, run that and see if there is anything else on your channel. If there is, change your router to another channel. If it is still on the "default" channel, this is likely an issue as everyone else's is a well!!!

Also, make sure everything on your wireless is 802.11G. If you have any older 802.11b devices, you suck everything down to 11Mb!!! If you have to use them, daisy chain another old router and move them to a different channel.

I don't know the consoles, but on the clients, disable "connect to non-preferred networks" or "search for available networks" and make sure your network is the only preferred network or at the top of the list.

A Full DVD which they seldom are even in the 2 disc movie/extras sets at 8.46Gb are about 68Gigabits. That comes out to 9.5Mb/s if it is a 2 hour movie. That should almost be watchable on 11Mb 802.11b!

Blu-Ray maxes out at 50GB which for a 2 hour movie comes out to 55.555...Mb/s. Since the movie is unlikely to be anywhere near the full 50Gb, a good 802.11G connection should be plenty fast enough...

Streaming anything from the Internet, your Internet connection is almost always going to be the bottleneck, not your LAN!!! 802.11b 11Mb wireless can handle way more than most any cable or DSL Internet connection speed available.

[cody]

Originally Posted by Dean

The most common problems with wireless are channel contention and B/G contention.

If you have a client that has a "Site Monitor" mode, run that and see if there is anything else on your channel. If there is, change your router to another channel. If it is still on the "default" channel, this is likely an issue as everyone else's is a well!!!

Also, make sure everything on your wireless is 802.11G. If you have any older 802.11b devices, you suck everything down to 11Mb!!! If you have to use them, daisy chain another old router and move them to a different channel.

I don't know the consoles, but on the clients, disable "connect to non-preferred networks" or "search for available networks" and make sure your network is the only preferred network or at the top of the list.

A Full DVD which they seldom are even in the 2 disc movie/extras sets at 8.46Gb are about 68Gigabits. That comes out to 9.5Mb/s if it is a 2 hour movie. That should almost be watchable on 11Mb 802.11b!

Blu-Ray maxes out at 50GB which for a 2 hour movie comes out to 55.555...Mb/s. Since the movie is unlikely to be anywhere near the full 50Gb, a good 802.11G connection should be plenty fast enough...

Streaming anything from the Internet, your Internet connection is almost always going to be the bottleneck, not your LAN!!! 802.11b 11Mb wireless can handle way more than most any cable or DSL Internet connection speed available.

I think in real life situations, even if you get excellent signal strength, you're only able to use about half of the actual speed that your hardware is supposedly operating at due to encryption and packet overhead. Also, I really thought a host could provide 54 meg to g clients and 11mb to b clients simutaneously, but even if that's the case, it is always highly recommended to turn off B if you don't need it.

Great post though. I've checked all of those things but it doesn't mean I shouldn't try some different channel numbers if I get stuttering. Unfortunately my crappy old Motorola G router with the latest firmware needs to be restarted after a busy couple days of torrentz, and as I said before, when playing DivX movies on my laptop via network drive and VLC Player, I'd get hiccups sometimes...so I'd just copy the movie over before playing it and it would then play great. Just took ~5 minutes to copy the 700MB movie over.

I'm looking fwd to trying Tversity, but between my crappy router and my 5 year old XP media server, I'll be surprised if it works well, without at least some tweaking. I'll play with it next week.

[Dean]

Most media players do very little caching of 'local" material. VLC is no exception, but!!!! it will let you customize it!!!

Use advanced open and bump the caching from the default 300ms up to a thousand or two.

Also, remember that as it is DIVX, so you are working the processor hard at the same time. You can occasionally have process contention on the PC even on a dual core CPU. It also depends on the server latency.

All in all, you are looking at significant latency being introduced waiting for a physical drive on the other end of a network connection at the mercy of 2 network stacks running on 2 different processors and other contentions. 300ms goes away real fast... Streaming players know this and cache a lot... local players assume everything is local and fast which it often isn't.

Your network can likely easily handle the throughput, it is you player that is likely the issue. Everyone always wants to blame the hardware when it is often a software issue.

The fact that you could pull a 1.5 hour 700MB movie over in under 5 minutes says your network is at least 15 times faster than it needs to be to stream it!!!

There is a also a caching setting in preferences somewhere that might help.

[cody]

I figured as much but I didn't know you could customize the cache in VLC. Awesome info!

And my hardware does suck being that after a couple days of torrentz, I always have to restart it. I can usually do so wirelessly through the browser GUI (RE: don't have to get up from the couch) though...but not always.

[Dean]

Many routers suffer from that problem especially ones with built in wireless. My firewall/internet router is separate from my wireless router and the former runs forever under any load, the later fails on a regular basis as have previous wireless routers.

Wireless has way more overhead and cpu/ memory requirements and cheapo routers never have enough of either.

Best relatively cheap wireless router out there is probably the Linksys wrt54g running one of the linux builds which have real memory management.

[Dewey]

Thanks Dean. That mostly fixed the problem with my routers. I constantly was resetting them before. Now I only have to reset like once every 3 days.

Also, I have one of the Wireless-N Netgear routers that Netgear claims is built for gaming (because I torrent and play games). What do you mean by My firewall/internet router is separate from my wireless router and the former runs forever under any load, the later fails on a regular basis as have previous wireless routers.?

[cody]

He means that his gateway router/firewall that isn't doing wireless works great, but his wireless router that sits behind the gateway needs to be restarted regularly.

[Dean]

Originally Posted by cody

He means that his gateway router/firewall that isn't doing wireless works great, but his wireless router that sits behind the gateway needs to be restarted regularly.

Correct. Though it is much better since I split the roles.

I have a very complex, for a home, network with a 24 port Cisco switch, 2 routers(1 wired, 1 wireless) another wireless AP and a bunch of wired and wireless clients. I keep watching Craigslist for a super cheap WRT54G which might replace both routers.

If you disable all security and encryption on your wireless, things are much more stable.