Question Networking Noob Trying to Utilize Steamlink

[friendstype25]

As it stands there is a raspberry pi 3b+ running RetroPie with an experimental Steamlink package installed. This communicates via WiFi to a PC two floors above. There are many devices all on the same router, and as such, Steamlink lags until it crashes or becomes completely unresponsive about once every five to twenty minutes.

Our first thought was to wire up the house for Ethernet. However, being a Victorian Era home makes doing this ourselves a dangerous prospect and hiring an electrician out of our budget.

Then I thought of Powerline Ethernet adapters. I'm completely clueless as to how many I need or how to set them up. Is that even an option in such an old electrically dubious abode?

 

[bill001g]

No way to predict how well powerline units will work. They are affected by the quality of wires in a house but there are pretty simplistic devices. They use the electrical wires as antenna to transmit the signals so the age of the wires is not so much a issue more how they are run.

Still actually using them is trivial you plug them into the outlet and they work or they do not. The units you buy packaged together are already factory paired so you do not even have to do that step.

Your issue with application does not really sound like a wifi problem. More you would get random spikes of data loss or delay not that it would crash...don't know how the application works.

Maybe buy ethernet cable and run it over the floor to test that the application runs correctly

 

[friendstype25]

I ran an ethernet cable directly from my PC to the Raspberry Pi and disabled WiFi to remove that as a variable. It worked flawlessly so I went ahead and purchased a pair of powerline units and wired everything up. No lag, no crashes. This is technically a LAN, correct?

 

[bill001g]

Yes powerline works more less the same as a ethernet cable just not as fast

 

[failboat]

I ran an ethernet cable directly from my PC to the Raspberry Pi and disabled WiFi to remove that as a variable. It worked flawlessly so I went ahead and purchased a pair of powerline units and wired everything up. No lag, no crashes. This is technically a LAN, correct?

wifi is technically the same LAN.
powerline is def not the same as when someone recommends "wired"
I would recommend doing all your testing wired first.

remote clients are all about latency.
these network friendly ones are using compression.
you have latency from encoding on the PC and decoding on the client.

I know it's possible to do this very fast. nvidia moonlight can run 1ms H265 to the nvidia shield. It varies widely when you change settings or hardware. on my pixelbook H264 is 71ms and H265 is 18ms; wifi or wired didn't change it much for me. I haven't tested any other clients, but I've seen people say they had 150ms+ on some. see if you can lookup the best case on your client and host. more than likely if you can't use a hardware encode/decode it's going to be very slow.

I believe nvidia purpose built very low latency hardware for this. so if you really want it go for moonlight/shield. moonlight requires a newer GTX card. It works with m/k or controller. the shield controller isn't too bad. really similar to xbox.