XBOX360 streaming - high throughput

tuckeratlarge · 23 Aug 2009

I installed DU Meter yesterday just out of curiosity to see speeds yes, but mainly to see how much I am downloading/uploading.

My kids were watching a film on the 360 streamed from my PC. According to the Task Manager it is using 25% of my 100Mbps LAN speeds. So far so what.

DU Meter concurs 25Mbps. But according to the stats it has uploaded 10Gigs in the hour. But the film they are watching is only a 947MB avi.

How come a 947MB file generates over 10Gigs of stream data?

dodo · 23 Aug 2009

I, too, think there is something fishy with the video streaming on the 360. I can watch HDTV fine over my wireless bridge but if I stream a wtv file from my Win7 HP Media Center extender it stops and starts constantly. The HDTV signal is also coming from a Hauppauge 2250 on the same machine and it works well yet playing a pre-recorded file from that same tv card doesn't?

When running the network test bar graph it averages 16-22mbit and stays nice and steady with no interruptions using Netmeter on the 'puter to measure. I can't believe my Pentium D 3.2GHz/2gig ram/1000gig WD Black machine is too slow for this but who knows?

zigzag3143 · 23 Aug 2009

tuckeratlarge said:

I installed DU Meter yesterday just out of curiosity to see speeds yes, but mainly to see how much I am downloading/uploading.

My kids were watching a film on the 360 streamed from my PC. According to the Task Manager it is using 25% of my 100Mbps LAN speeds. So far so what.

DU Meter concurs 25Mbps. But according to the stats it has uploaded 10Gigs in the hour. But the film they are watching is only a 947MB avi.

How come a 947MB file generates over 10Gigs of stream data?

Tucker

Unless you have a huge humongous connection, uploading 10 gigs means 1 gig every six minutes up. thats pretty high. Whats the connection to the ISP rated at?

Ken

dodo · 23 Aug 2009

zigzag3143 said:

Tucker

Unless you have a huge humongous connection, uploading 10 gigs means 1 gig every six minutes up. thats pretty high. Whats the connection to the ISP rated at?

Ken

LOL
He's streaming over his lan to his Xbox 360.

tuckeratlarge · 24 Aug 2009

5hi7h34d said:

LOL
He's streaming over his lan to his Xbox 360.

Correctomundo

It only seems to be this big/fast on this particular file. All the others hover around 1-3Mbps and subsequently only send the size of the file in question. I don't understand why one is so big.

Corpsecrank · 24 Aug 2009

The answer is because your streaming directly from the PC to the 360 and your not using the same type of bandwidth you would get from your PC to the internet. When your on the net your limited to the ISP speeds or you and whatever server your connected to. When you go direct between your PC and another local device such as your 360 the only limit is how fast your PC and the device are and what kind of cable you have.

So you have a lot of bandwidth to send a large amount of data quickly in a local environment that is one side of this. The other side is the data being sent.

Since you are streaming video and speeds between this video and others varies I would assume the movie you streamed is encoded at a high bit rate. Because the movie is high bit rate during streaming it is not sending the file but the information the file contains. So if the movie plays at (X)kbps then it needs to send that through the connection. Streaming is much different than transferring a file. If you were moving the file you would only need to send the size of the file over the connection.

I hope this explains why you see such high bandwidth usage streaming from the PC to the 360.

tuckeratlarge · 24 Aug 2009

I see what you mean Corpsecrank, the video in question is encoded at 4280kbps and most of the others are under 1000kbps

Jebus thats a lot of bandwidth from my PC to my Xbox360, good job it's not over the interwebitubes

Corpsecrank · 24 Aug 2009

Precisely however that answer is not an obvious one so I am glad I could explain it in a way that made sense to you.

I work with a lot of video and I also managed a network if it were not for having personal experience in those 2 things I probably wouldn't know the answer either

You know now that I think about it I forgot one last point of importance in all of this.

You may think back on this and say what about streaming media over the net? Why does that not use so much bandwidth.

There are 2 reasons I should have mentioned about that fact.

1. Video that is meant to be streamed over the internet is not encoded at a high bit rate.

and

2. Video you are streaming over the internet is not streamed the same as streaming to your 360. With streaming over the internet most videos are streaming the file or parts of the file to your pc where it is then read by the pc at the proper bit rate. It does vary from file to file how it is streamed though. Flash for instance (shockwave .swf) is streamed as a file your downloading and played from your browser cache and can be played back as it is being downloaded. That is one form of streaming from the net. However flash like you see on video sites such as youtube are streamed differently.