House of Pain

There is a lot of misconceptions from what I have seen as to why video is skipping when you attempt to stream movies from your PC/MAC to your PS3. A lot of the problems that people are running into is why their wireless cannot keep up with video even if they have Wireless G speeds. Let me show you some information to shed some light onto why you are experiencing jumpy videos.

Wireless Streaming

Streaming your videos via wireless can be a great thing or very frustrating. The problem you will notice is that when you exceed 6Mbps on your Information Screen on the PS3 that you will begin skipping. Why is that you ask? You have hit maximum thoroughput for sending data to your PS3. This means what if you go over 6Mbps, you will skip. But if you stay under that mark you will have smooth sailing.

I am sure there are some of you that may have read this quickly, but I want to reitterate the Mbps. That stands for mega-bits-per-second. Not be confused with MBps. Which stands for mega-bytes-per-second. Remember there are 8-bits in one byte. So you can tell from this conversion that if you have 6Mbps it equals out to being only 0.71526MBps using THIS CALCULATOR. Big difference huh? I am sure you are shaking your head saying that Wireless G is capable of handling 54Mbps speeds. Please keep in mind that you are utilizing over half of 54Mbps for the handshaking protocol. To summarize wikipedia, in order for your PC/MAC to send the correct information to your PS3 it acts like this:

PC: “Hey PS3, did you get the numbers 1011011 that I just sent you?”

PS3: “Yes.”

PC: “Are you ready for more information PS3?”

PS3: “Yes”

……….PC sends more information to the PS3………….

Now there are times when the PS3 does not get the same numbers that the PC has just sent. This will require the PC to resend the information back to the PS3. This is called retransmission. When you have a retransmission of data, it will result in less thoroughput on your network. This is why some files seem to take forever on wireless while lightning fast on a wired connection.

So because your PC/MAC has to talk to your PS3 so much to verify that it received everything okay, it results in a lot of information exchange to ensure that the proper information is being sent. That is why you cannot achieve 54Mbps speeds on data transfers.

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So now hopefully you have an idea as to why this skipping is happening to you. So if you are want to watch HD content, count on using a wired connection since it is 100Mbit connection. A 1000Mbit connection is even bitter if you happened to encode your movies uncompressed.