will 85Mbps be enough for hd video

ali825 · 25 Mar 2008 at 15:38

hi ya, what i am wanting to do is get some home plugs for my computer and want to know if they will have enough bandwidth to send it around the house, at once there will only be 1 hd files streaming and or may be 2 or 3 sd video going around, there will be no other stuff going on at the same time.

ali

DRZ · 25 Mar 2008 at 16:20

Depends on how clean your power lines are really. What else do you have running? I can't properly stream 1080 content over maximum-strength 54g wireless and I wouldn't imagine you would get much better from the powerline stuff. 1080 in h.264 is about 2MB/sec you need to sustain but the way that most software seems to work is that it buffers it and then bursts it when it needs to fill the buffer, leaving you short of bandwidth (certainly over wireless).

Try it and see

St0rmer66 · 26 Mar 2008 at 00:53

I will give it a go if I remember tomorrow, going to bed now. I'll be streaming from my pc to my xbox360 in another room.

As a side note I can faultlessly watch high quality SD material (624x352 - 350mb ~40mins) which scales up on my TV to 720p and looks fantastic, but I have yet to watch a "true" HD clip across it yet. My old wireless setup struggled doing these type of clips and used to stop and buffer every so often... was very annoying.

DRZ · 26 Mar 2008 at 02:12

I spoke to a friend of mine who has some experience of these and he said achieving approximately 40Mbps was "about right". This gives you enough theoretical bandwidth to get away with h.264 depending on how it buffers.

For a decent experience, put in some cat5/5e/6 and reap the benefits of at least 100Mbps with the option to upgrade to gigabit later

errata · 26 Mar 2008 at 14:00

Most reviews of 85 mbps homeplug that mention streaming HD suggest that 1 stream is usally OK, though formats and resolution vary quite a bit in the reviews. Picking a 720 HD stream over 1080 would make sense if your tv's made for 720.

AbsenceJam · 26 Mar 2008 at 18:32

What is the actual throughput of homeplug kit, is it anything like wireless where you get nothing that vaguely approaches the 'connection speed?'
Actual Blu-ray discs have maximum bitrates that almost reach 50Mb/s, obviously title dependent. So if you have throughput of 50Mb/s you're safe, obviously all these x264 encodes have bitrates that are a fraction of an actual BD disc.