what is your 'peak bitrate'?

[devildriver1]

Hi,

I setup pms for the first time and I love it! Anyway, everything is working great, and my peak bitrate (shown on the status page) is 37Mb/s.

I'm wondering what a solid bitrate is; I've only streamed average quality stuff from my PC so I don't know whether it will suffice for higher quality video.

I've seen some posts reporting 200+ Mb/s which seems extrememly fast. I'm wondering how I could improve my peak speed, as my setup is:

20m ethernet cable to PC (pc reports 100Mb/s connection)
200Mb/s powerline (I'm guessing this is the most limiting part)
ethernet cable to Bravia TV. (I have a PS3 as well but I prefer accessing content straight from TV)

Thanks!

Edit: Now shows as 54Mb/s. I don't know what caused the increase but I'm not complaining

[Val Killmore]

Just remember the "weakest link in the chain" addage.

On paper, the 20 m ethernet cable is the most restrictive part of your setup. But in reality, it may very well be the powerline adapter, as some are reported to be inefficient, and nowhere near the claimed thruput.

You can have a gigabit setup with gigabit router and switches and adapters, but if even one of your cables (either on PC or renderer) is 100 Mbps Cat5, that is going to be the absolute max your connection speed can reach. Most I have ever achieved with normal Cat 5 cable is 93 Mbps.

if you want to possibly increase your thruput, you could try adding a Cat 5e cable (notice the 'e'). I use them, a gigabit router and have my PS3 adapter set for 1 gigabit, and get a connection speed of 512 Mbps.

With your power adapter inline, you might not achieve as high a speed as me, but should increase none the less.

[rakosnicek]

I setup pms for the first time and I love it! Anyway, everything is working great, and my peak bitrate (shown on the status page) is 37Mb/s.
...
Edit: Now shows as 54Mb/s. I don't know what caused the increase but I'm not complaining

Things that impact your peak bitrate:
- motherboard
- network interface chip
- what else the computer is doing when it is measured

[pawnslinger]

Just remember the "weakest link in the chain" addage.

On paper, the 20 m ethernet cable is the most restrictive part of your setup. But in reality, it may very well be the powerline adapter, as some are reported to be inefficient, and nowhere near the claimed thruput.

You can have a gigabit setup with gigabit router and switches and adapters, but if even one of your cables (either on PC or renderer) is 100 Mbps Cat5, that is going to be the absolute max your connection speed can reach. Most I have ever achieved with normal Cat 5 cable is 93 Mbps.

if you want to possibly increase your thruput, you could try adding a Cat 5e cable (notice the 'e'). I use them, a gigabit router and have my PS3 adapter set for 1 gigabit, and get a connection speed of 512 Mbps.

With your power adapter inline, you might not achieve as high a speed as me, but should increase none the less.

Okay, my bitrate on the status screen is always 0. So I am not sure what the bitrate is measuring there, but I think maybe it has to do with transcoding speed... and not your LAN speed. My blu-ray player has a display that shows bitrate, and it jumps all over the place while playing a video from PMS. It usually averages below 4 mbs, which is not surprising since most of my videos are encoded with a bitrate below 4 mbs. But it often peaks as much as 12 to 14 mbs depending on what is happening in the video. I am running totally wifi with 3 year old equipment... my wife won't allow wires. I have been thinking of upgrading to a newer router and bridges, but I am unsure of the benefit of the extra bandwidth newer tech would offer. But I most likely will upgrade to a dual band router to be able to smoothly handle multiple streams.