Stupid PS3/Router issue (Streaming media)

Insanity · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:03

Hey all,

Been using TVersity to stream media to my PS3 for a while now, which seems to work fine. But i have 2 really annoying issues.

The first one is, i have a dodgy splitter hooked up to one of the phone lines in the house that causes my connection to drop out occasionally, this wouldnt be an issue if it wasnt for the fact that if im watching streaming media at the time it disconnects, i also lose the connection to the media server. (TVersity)

I dont see why losing my connection should affect anything on the local network? Is there any way around this?

The second one is, some random video files of mine refuse to stream. I get the "unsupported media" message or whatever it is, even though they play fine on the PC. I keep hearing about TVersity converting videos on the fly, but im not entirely sure if mine is doing it right. :confused:

Substance · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:26

I find that my ps3 will simply not play a lot of files that my pc and 360 will play, not sure why, it is just fussy, i think i may have narrowed it down to just the videos that are longer in length, 30-40 min vids work fine but any longer and it won't even open them,

I also find tversity useless, i much prefer just using media player 11, no converting rubbish, it just works

If you are losing connection i would say it is more than likely that your router is rebooting itself rather than dropping packets, a lot of older routers do this when attempting to make to many connections (eg.bittorrent)

Insanity · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:32

Thanks for the reply.

The length of the videos i've been playing vary, most are well over 40mins long, but i get the occasional (and seemingly random) one that refuses to play for no good reason.

I tried WMP11 originally to stream, but for some reason everytime i install it i lose sound on my PC, this has happened twice now, so i just gave up and used TVersity.

I think you touched on something with the router thing. It does reboot itself when losing a connection instead of just reconnecting, i guess thats why i lose the local connection aswell... i wonder if there's a way for Netgear routers to just reconnect the lost connection instead of rebooting themselves?

Tombo · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:32

You haven't got your transcoding options right if it won't play your files.

Substance · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:36

Tombo said:
You haven't got your transcoding options right if it won't play your files.

i don't transcode at all and yet the ps3 still refuses to play some files that really should work

Insanity · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:39

Can you give me a rundown of how the transcoding should be set? I've just been messing with it and im still getting the "Unsupported data type" error on the same files that were doing it before i start mashing buttons.

EDIT: Nevermind, i just set it to "Always Transcode" and now they're workin.

Thanks for that! Still got the router issue though.

Substance · 24 Mar 2008 at 00:54

Insanity said:
Still got the router issue though.

Have you tried ending any programs/shutting down any pc's that are accessing the internet? give that a try then maybe you can see what is causing the problem, when it used to happen to me a lot all i did was lower the number of incoming and outgoing connections on my bittorrent client and it was fine

Malc · 24 Mar 2008 at 01:46

What router do you have?

Is it the netgear DG834G Version 3 by any chance? If it is update it to the new 04.01.35 beta firmware thats floating around the web. It solved all of my PS3 connection problems with this router.

Also, try using WPA instead of WEP to secure it because mine used to drop connections all the time.

About the transcoding thing, you can set certain folders to transcode all the time and others to never transcode etc. So I created 2 folders, one with the files that don't work in and set it transcode always and another folder with the rest in that never transcodes.

Insanity · 24 Mar 2008 at 07:06

Nah, mine is the Netgear DG834, which is the wired version of the DG834G from memory.

Anyway, the connection dropping out isn't really the issue. I know why it's doing that (one of my splitters is cactus), what i dont understand is why do i lose my local connection (PC to PS3) when my internet connection drops out. Seeing they're on a local network, i would imagine they should be able to network together regardless of if my phone cord was even plugged in or not.

As i said earlier, i think it's got something to do with the router rebooting to regain the internet connection, which means everything on the network stops in it's tracks, instead of just reconnecting to the net normally and letting the local network keep doing its thing.

Man i hope that made sense. =/