XBox 360 and HDTV over WiFi: Tips and Tricks

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/12/15/hdtv-over-wifi-general-impressions/' target='_blank'>http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/12/15/hdtv-over-wifi-general-impressions/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"After trying to take advantage of the WiFi streaming for high-def, I'm a little disappointed. As I mentioned, the quality of the video is great, but only when you can see via your network. 802.11 a, b, and g standards for WiFi are getting a little old and tired. Additionally, the real throughput is essentially half of the advertised speed; and that's a best case scenario."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/tuner1.jpg" /><br /><br />If you've picked up an XBox 360 and are running into problems trying to wirelessly stream high-def content to it be sure to check out this article. While 802.11 a and g theoretically provide enough bandwidth for this, in reality you are going to need to tweak things a bit and then still cross your fingers to have a chance. Still, if you can get it to work, the results should be outstanding.

[jeffd]

Yea, 802.11g isn't the shining holy light of central server media streaming for the household. And part of it is due to its throughput.

Sometimes, and depending on the bitrates of the files, I can actually stream the downloaded tv shows I watch over wifi to my laptop, but it dosn't allways work hitch free. For me this is a number of reasons. One is, how is explorer behaving. If I downloading some torrents (or anything) to the drive I am accessing, explorer has a hernia on the remote client. For some reason, even if I don't have the directory open that the files are being uploaded (and therefore updated) in, the explorer on the remote side keeps updating over and over, This will totaly delay your explorer response times and take up cpu because when explorer is stuck.. so are you!

Then there is the quality of drivers factor. Because I am allways watching my stuff remotly on a celeron 1100 laptop, I have very little cpu to spare. So little infact that my wifi card can take about %5 idle (a few times, i've had to pull the wifi card and manualy close the wifi monitoring software to play back a high bitrate movie smoothly, usualy when a movie is using AC3 or subtitles wich takes more cpu then usual), and 10-15% when transfering data. If a movie requires most of my cpu to playback, then streaming it will cause lots of skipping.

Oh, and fixing your rwin values is a must! By default, XP transfers data over my wifiG network like a sloth. I use doctor TCP to change my rwin to 256960 on all my computers, and I can get full speed from my wifiG easily when transfering files. I bet the xbox also has a poor rwin setting like XP does by default. Wonder if its changeable.