The Glade 4.0

QFT

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

It's been right there, in Google's warm, loving repository... All this time.

I didn't know!!! *sobs* I didn't know-ow-ow...

My all-time favorite streaming media app/server was the 'Xbox Media Center' (XBMC), which was a homebrew app that ran on the original xbox (required a modchip or softmod to run). From a usability and functionality standpoint it is the best I've ever used. My original xbox had a 250G hard drive, could launch games (which I owned!!) from the hard drive, play almost any encoded video type from its genre over the wire or off of the local hard drive, and even had some proprietary social gaming network stuff built into it that allowed you to play "System Connect" games over the Internet by tunneling through a server running on your PC. XBMC itself was a joy to use, if a bit of a pain to set up (lots of xml stuff to edit).

Sadly it never transitioned into the HD video realm because the hardware was incapable of decoding it fast enough. It was a victim of the limitations and lifespan of its platform.

I had hopes that a Linux port would get traction, but alas, I fear it has not been maintained.

Edit:
It does look like there is still some development going on. I'll have to read up on this later.
http://xbmc.org/

Here are some screenshots and video's of the UI (skinned)
http://xbmc.org/skins/

I could see that for a full quality blu-ray download (which is around 30 gigabytes for a 2 hour movie), but a 720p rip of Star Trek (2008), for example, is only 3 GB. That streams no problem over wireless.

It should also be noted that Wireless transfer rates are typically 108 Mbit/second, which is far more than anyone is getting over the Internet, anyway, and "Netflix" is still dependant on the speed of a broadband connection.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Taly, the total size of the file has nothing to do with the issues I'm describing.

It really does, since it's completely related to bandwidth usage. Total size of the file divided by the length of play = bandwidth usage.

For instance, 3 GB / 2 hours = 1.5 GB/hour = about 3.3 to 3.4 Megabits/second. That's the network bandwidth you need to stream a video file that is 3GB in size and 2 hours in length. (And that's assuming you get 100% efficiency and no slowdowns.) Blu-Ray quality 1080p video is unstreamable short of a 40 Megabit/second FiOS connection, and even then you aren't going to get anywhere close to it since you'll run into internet bandwidth bottlenecks.

Both of those are well within the 108 Mb/s limit of wireless G LAN, though. You're more likely to run into other problems that cause slowdowns than the fact that you're running wireless. Remember, home wireless LAN bandwidth is always far faster than cable or satellite streaming bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the only pure measure that is unaffected by such things as the compression of the file being watched, since the method of transmission isn't really doing any additional compression of the file. The size of the file over the speed at which it needs to be streamed is a pure, hard measurement. If the file is compressed, that just means there is additional work to be done at the end decompressing it for viewing, but the transmission method doesn't care about that--a 3GB, 2 hour video file needs to transfer at 3.4 Mb/s in order to stream without stopping to buffer. That's all there is to it.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

My wireless G LAN never had enough throughput to stream HD content to my Xbox or HTPC. Standard def stuff was no problem, but anything beyond that was impossible. With all of the security settings, and signal loss, HD was never a possibility for me. And don't even think about running the microwave while trying to watch something. When I moved into the new house, we ran Cat5 cable from the office to the living room. Problem solved.

How are you getting 108 Mb/s with G? I thought that was N? Because I never, ever got the full 54 Mb/s that G was supposed to get. Not even close.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

I have a peice of **** ancient D-Link DI-624 router that does it. It's not new. (http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=6)

Works great for LAN connections, but not so much for Internet. Lousy thing is dying, it reboots constantly while downloading torrents. (Apparently a common problem with this model as it ages, but what do you expect for $30 four years ago?)

Microwave doesn't seem to affect it for me, although I've heard that other people have that problem. Probably just the layout of our house.

I've never had a problem streaming 720p content. (The 3.0 GB file I'm referring to is a blu-ray rip of the recent star trek movie, downscaled to 720p, streams great wirelessly to my PS3.) I've never tried anything more than that, but that took a while to download. You're not likely going to get a file that quality to stream instantly over Netflix.

Point is, regardless, wireless at home is faster than your broadband connection, short of having FiOS. And even then, it's probably faster. If your wireless LAN is your bottleneck, either your internet is remarkably fast, or your wireless network is really bad!

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Situation:

350mb file (.mkv, h.264 encoded, 720p)
Transcoded on the fly by PS3MS on a computer that has a c2d e6600 (3.0ghz).
Streamed through a wireless N router 10 feet away to my PS3

Still results in stuttering at points. Explain.

Can't explain your setup, anymore than you can explain a 350mb file (.vob, h.264 encoded, 720p...describes about every TV show I download), not transcoded on the fly but converted from .mkv in advance on a computer with an ancient AMD Athlon XP 2500+ streamed through an ancient wireless G (108) router 15 feet away to my PS3 not stuttering at all.

Your results may vary?

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Only difference would be the not transcoding thing. I'm far too lazy to have to convert every file I download and I want the program to do it for me.

Maybe. For reference, MKV2VOB (app I linked above) did the conversion of that 3GB Trek movie in about 2 minutes. It's not actually changing the format of the video or audio streams, it's just taking them apart and repacking them. (MKV is just a container format, it doesn't actually use its own audio or video standards, and most MKVs already contain formats that the PS3 can understand, it just doesn't understand how to open the wrapper, so to speak.)

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I realize it's fast, but I've also never had it work correctly with subtitles.

Blame your computer, not your Wireless Connection.

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That makes sense. One of the reasons for switching to MKV was to provide a container file format that included dynamic subtitling.

I usually keep subtitles OFF, though, so I wouldn't notice.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I suspected as much after posting. What would I need to make this work?