Pixelated Streaming; What are the best options?

[Dark Wombat]

When we first tried Steam In Home streaming a couple years ago it was great. However, the last couple times we have tried the picture just looks bad.

The host computer is a high end i5 with a Radeon 290x and 8gb of ram. The desktop resolution is 1920x1080.

The client is a laptop, Acer Aspire Acer 7739g, with 4gb of ram and a geforce 610m. The processor is an i5. Desktop is 1680x1050. From this laptop, the VGA out goes to a nice monitor.

Our home internet gets amazing speeds 200Mbps, but our network is through powerline. The bedroom that has the client gets 60Mbps speeds. I do not see an issue there.

When we stream, we see something like this especially when in darker areas and when moving the camera:

http://i.imgur.com/QHBkIH4.jpg

That picture is an extreme case but its a good example.

My question is, what specific options would be causing this? Do the desktop sizes have to match? Does "unlimited bandwidth" actually make it worse?

Thanks

[kreiselhoschi]

First of all: your internet connection doesn´t matter. IHS only utilizes your LAN. 60Mbit/s is on the edge, at least for high resolutions with high detail. Possibly your powerline adaptor is adding some delay - this cannot be diagnosed from anybody else but you since it´s a lot depending on other devices like microwave influencing your power grid. If some frequencies overlap, it will most probably lead to fragmented picture and artifacts as you describe.

Unlimited bandwith sure will make it worse, it tells the host to give all power it can spare to the encoding, but not necessarily with better results. Valve recommends not to use this option. I´d suggest you try 30Mbit/s encoding and tinker with balanced or fast settings to see if this improves your experience.

[MasterMind]

It could also be the quality of the lines in your house that the powerlines are running through causing an issue...whats your estimated bandwidth in in-home streaming? is it fluctuating? Do what kreiselhoschi recommends but I would also try lowering the stream to say 15mbs, if your powerline bandwidth is an issue keeping it at 30 or unlimited won't help...even if you change the quality setting to fast...it won't change how much data its pushing. if you find your powerline to be an issue the best thing you can do is find a cheap wireless N router, even single band should be fine, I bought a cheap trendnet dual band router 300mbs for 10 bucks on newegg, and also upgraded my laptop wifi to dual band for another 10 bucks on amazon, its great at 300mbs, gets me between 10-20ms max...plus 5ghz is better, you could maybe get away with it on 2.4ghz but not in a noisy wifi environment...from the pic you posted it tells me its a delay in data reaching the client

[BGK]

Also, avoid using AMD hardware encoding, quality is subpar.
Given your setup, I'd use

For encode
HW Intel > Software > HW AMD

For decode
HW Intel > HW Nvidia > Software

Might be relevant:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/617320628217643948/

How are your latency/ping and packet loss between your two hosts?

[Dark Wombat]

Last night I got everything to run perfectly. After an hour of testing I tried turning off all hardware encoding and decoding. Basically all software. it works great.

Now how can someone explain why? Is software encoding and decoding basically letting both CPUs do all the work?

[Dark Wombat]

Ping was 15 and packet loss was like 0.50%

[Dark Wombat]

I wont settle however.

How can I enable Intel Quicksync HW encoding? I know the workaround regarding deleting the amf folder and forcing it but how does that work? Not one person on that thread mentions how you actually enable it! In other words, under Advanced Host options, I dont see a checkbox for Intel Quicksync.

[fiah]

Originally posted by Dark Wombat:

How can I enable Intel Quicksync HW encoding?

If the checkbox is not there, then I assume that your "high end i5" is a Sandy Bridge CPU, like the i5-2500K. You need to enable the GPU on that processor by either connecting a display to it, or making it think that you have a display connected to it. How you do that varies with your OS but you basically have to force VGA output. After you do that, the GPU on your CPU will be enabled and the QuickSync module will be available, assuming the drivers etc. work. All this is not needed on the Ivy Bridge or later CPUs.

BTW, all things considered, if your CPUs are fast enough on both the host and the client, software encoding and decoding will give you the best results with the best compatibility. However, especially on the host this will often not be the case because the host also has to run the games which are often very CPU intensive. There are several games that I can play smoothly using software encoding, but when I enable hardware encoding I can play any game, regardless of how demanding it is.

Regarding your network, you said that you have a 15ms ping and 0.50% packet loss on your powerline network. In my opinion both those values sound a bit high, especially the ping. Ideally your powerline network should have 0 packetloss and about 1ms ping, but I'm not sure if that is possible for all adapters. If that 15ms you mentioned is the display latency as indicated in the performance overlay, then that is actually very good! Anyway, to make sure you can actually use in home streaming, you should test the effective bandwidth of your network in the direction of your host to your client. The easiest way is to copy a huge file (video or something) from host to client using a windows network share and look at the transfer rate. I'm not sure what the minimum rate is at which in home streaming is still viable, but I would guess that you need about 60 Mbit/s, which is about 5.5 Mbyte/s. So if your windows network file copying consistently at around that speed or faster, you should be ok. Open a command prompt and use "ping 192.168.1.101" or "ping mylaptopshostname" or whatever the IP/hostname is of the client to see the roundtrip ping time. Above 10ms is definitely very bad, and most wired networks should have about 1ms (wireless can have ~3ms or more).

[Dark Wombat]

I have an i5 3570k Ivy Bridge. Odd.