In Home Streaming Speed

[atomiku]

So here's an interesting predicament. 

 

I'm trying to stream my (totally legally obtained) movies from my desktop's hard drive to my PS3. Because for some odd reason the PS3 only plays nicely with my network shared folders a fraction of the time (they work all the time on other windows devices and all my android devices) I am using a bit of software cleverly called "PS3 Media Server."

 

Sometimes it works great, and other times, not so much, with intermittent stuttering that seems awfully like buffering to me. This seems to be linked to the size of the file, so I'm assuming it's a bandwidth issue. The software has a couple options I've tweaked, one helped some, the other didn't seem to help at all.

 

The first thing I tried was increasing the buffer size from it's original setting of 200MB. This helped in that it enabled the PS3 to load more of the data while paused, but it would eventually work through it's buffer and require me to pause it and let it buffer again, clearly not an ideal situation. I also found a Max bitrate setting, which I set to 0 (the settings say that means unlimited). My only issue with that is that it has an indicator on the main page showing it's current and peak bitrates, and max stays locked at 35 Mb/s no matter what I set the max bitrate to.

 

I don't think this is a hardware issue, as both the PS3 and the Desktop are using Ethernet, I know my desktop is gigabit, I know my router is as well, and would be shocked to find out that the PS3 is using less than 100 Mb, likely it's also gigabit. So right now I can work on a theoretical bottleneck of 100Mb/s. My drive is a WD Blue 1TB 7200 with sequential reads of ~130MB/s (which my rudimentary math tells me should be a bit over gigabit speeds) so that's clearly not a bottleneck, even though it's only over SATA 2 (3 Gb/s).

 

So as far as I can tell, the bottleneck has to somehow be software based? Is there something I can do to fix this? Is it a PS3 issue? Can it NOT accept data faster than 35Mb/s?

 

Any help is appreciated.