Moonlight + Apollo / Powerline Adapters

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Hey guys,

I could really use some advice.

I have my gaming PC upstairs and my newly bought LG C5 downstairs. I have two AV2000 powerline adapters providing my computer with wired internet and the ability to stream movies to my TV via Plex. It works beautifully. With the same method I was hoping to stream a game via Moonlight but sadly the experience hasn't been too great. I find the experience to be choppy and though my monitor is 1440p I was hoping to stream in 4K on the TV but I'm not able to.

Is this the limits of the technology or have I missed a setting or done something incorrectly? I was hoping for a smooth experience. To note I checked the line and the adapters are providing 600Mbps.

Thanks.
 
The adapters are reporting 600Mbps, but the chances of you actually being able to get 600Mbps through them is slim to none. It might be worth running some tests to see what real world throughput you can get - fire up iperf3 on a machine at each end of the connection and see what it reports.

Have you tried Wi-Fi? Powerline is in theory a great idea but I've always found that a decent Wi-Fi setup is loads better than Powerline.
 
Hi, not sure if you have solved this already, but I did everything to try and make it work smoothly. I had a periodic stutter ever 20 seconds or so, that I chased thinking it was a frame timing issue or something with the client vs the host. Apart from that stutter it felt responsive, low latency and high fidelity.

Tried everything, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was a limitation of the powerline tech. You can get good overall throughput, but consistent low latency is extremely difficult.Something about how the system can also need to recalibrate every so often as the signal runs through the power cables of the house.

Anyway, it all went away with an Ethernet cable.

Hey guys,

I could really use some advice.

I have my gaming PC upstairs and my newly bought LG C5 downstairs. I have two AV2000 powerline adapters providing my computer with wired internet and the ability to stream movies to my TV via Plex. It works beautifully. With the same method I was hoping to stream a game via Moonlight but sadly the experience hasn't been too great. I find the experience to be choppy and though my monitor is 1440p I was hoping to stream in 4K on the TV but I'm not able to.

Is this the limits of the technology or have I missed a setting or done something incorrectly? I was hoping for a smooth experience. To note I checked the line and the adapters are providing 600Mbps.

Thanks.
 
The issue here is PROBABLY that AV2000 kit is wired half duplex, not full duplex, and relies on relatively coarse, clunky timing windows, at least for something as adaptable as gaming which wants as low latency as possible; both in terms of the video, but also the return path for controls and other inputs. This can cause problems with rapidly alternating bi-directional traffic which the older standards struggle with (fundamentally AV2000 is from middle of the last decade). Agility/low latency are a key requirement of real‑time gaming, and those clunky, relatively inflexible windows result in jitter. The stutter Chef mentions was likely error/timing correction or client/host resync caused by slight desyncs rather than raw bandwidth limitations; your 600Mbps are more than enough for that - hell most people push less than that to VR headsets :)

One of the key benefits of the latest/current G.Hn standard isn’t peak throughput, but it handles scheduling and busy environments in a much more agile and adjustable way, and typically doesn't fall over in scenarios where older Powerline standards would, like difficult or noisy conditions. While still technically half duplex, it uses much shorter windows, more granular scheduling, and faster turnarounds, allowing it to behave much more like full duplex for realtime traffic, reducing that jitter to something more tolerable. I know that sounds weird, but in practice it can simulate full fat, bidirectional duplex LAN behaviour far more effectively than older standards, even if its not truly full duplex. Compared to Homeplug/AV1/AV2 standards which used larger windows primarily optimised for raw data transfer speeds, streaming and internet usage rather than mixed or real‑time usage like VOIP or realtime online gaming, G.Hn is just considerably more responsive.

Even if bandwidth and average latency are fine on AV2000, its more clearly half duplex nature was likely the limiting factor there, as that has traditionally been the main drawback of powerline networking (along with throughput being considerably lower than the headline speeds). When powerline was at its peak about 10-15 years ago, Wi‑Fi was FAR less mature (read: It was bloody awful for gaming), and powerline often performed CONSIDERABLY better in real‑world use. Since then, WiFi has advanced massively in terms of smarter, much faster scheduling and lower latency contention handling, and much, much, MUCH more capable multi channel routers (and MUCH better ISP supplied routers) etc — despite WiFi also being half duplex — which is one reason a proper hardwired (full duplex) LAN connection is still superior to both.

TLDR: You really want to have G.Hn units if you're pushing this kind of use over powerline, they're just better suited and a more modern standard, to the point that throughput might be the same or lower, but jitter and flexibility are better. They're far more aimed at real world, mixed-usage, and non ideal circumstances, whereas the older AV standards expected everyone to play nicely and be willing to wait - essentially British scheduling as opposed to Japanese, which is far more granular haha :)
 
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