Universal Media Server | Forum

Hi, I have a Macbook Pro, Apple Time Capsule (functionally the same as an Airport Extreme) and an Xbox 360. I've been trying to stream from my Macbook Pro to the Xbox 360 but no matter what I do I keep getting a peak bitrate of 5-7 Mb/s so the video is so choppy as to be completely unwatchable. It will play for half a second then freeze for 2 or 3 seconds, and that's the best I can get.

I have my Xbox port forwarded on the Time Capsule, and I have ports 5000 and 1900 (found that somewhere else) forwarded as well. I've tried adjusting the video quality settings down to keyint=25:vqmax=7:vqmin=2, which seems to help a little bit but I think the issue is more with it not opening up enough bandwidth, rather than being unable to keep up with quality. It also doesn't seem to matter what I set the Maximum Bandwidth to under General Configuration.

What I would really prefer is simply to stream my videos "as is" without any transcoding or muxing done, but the low peak bitrate issue is the priority here as there's no way my xbox, time capsule and macbook are only able to communicate at 7Mb/s when I get much faster speeds then that when gaming over the internet. Since this is all happening on my local network and not actually going over the internet, my internet speed (which is fairly high) should come into play here, if I understand things correctly. This should all be based on the speak of my router (the Apple Time Capsule), so I can't figure out what's slowing things down.

Any suggestions on how I can increase the peak bitrate that UMS will allow me to use?

Hi Cardoset, you can try opening the file renderers/XBOX360.conf and raising "MaxVideoBitrateMbps" from 30 to 110 and see if that makes a difference

Thanks for the reply.
I tried what you suggested but it didn't make a difference. It's still just as slow and jumpy as every.

UMS doesn't limit the bandwidth so it must be something else limiting it, what happens if you connect from the computer to the Xbox without the Time Capsule?

How is that possible? I thought a router was required. I'm not doing anything directly to specifically include the time capsule, I just assumed the connection was going through my wireless network. Are you sure it's possible to connect directly from my computer to the Xbox without a local wireless network? I'll try it out, anyway.

Did you toy with the Mencoder quality settings and see if it's a bandwidth issue?

I'm not sure what that means. How would I try that?

Cardoset wrote:I'm not sure what that means. How would I try that?

Transcoding Settings tab > Video quality settings > MPEG-2 options

I have mine set to the "good quality" setting for ethernet. Which is:

keyint=5:vqscale=2:vqmin=3

Also, you might want to mess around with this:

General Configuration tab > network settings (advanced) > Maximum bandwidth in Mb/s

I have mine set to 70 instead of the default of 110. I found that playing around with both of these settings I was able to get all videos to work perfectly (no choppy audio/video).