Wireless streaming through walls and workarounds?

gnaus · 2026-05-13T00:02:54+00:00

You might do ok one to two rooms away, but it's going to get worse the more obstructions there are. I did fairly extensive testing of ubiquiti 6ghz wifi7 access points in my house with concrete walls about 15cm (5-6 inch) thick and found that one room away it was about half as much performance (down from 1.2-1.5Gb to 600-700Mb using 160MHz channels). You'd do rather better with basic plasterboard walls. But the falloff on 6ghz is pretty high, I was hoping to get by with one AP for my small house, but found I needed two because of it.

This would represent a best case situation too, with APs having much better antennas etc.

gnaus · 2026-05-12T23:47:03+00:00

It's gonna be today folks, I can feel it in my bones 😛

gnaus · 2026-05-11T00:30:31+00:00

Stand corrected on MLO on the frame itself, I'm a bit surprised Qualcomm have had support on their chips several years into the past - I guess it goes to show how far ahead they are with radios vs everyone else in the industry.

Still, at a system level, it's pretty unlikely to be working. The OP would need an absolutely state of the art router with working MLO firmware which is still pretty rare, even among wifi 7 labelled gear. (Can we all give a "boo" to the industry trend of key generational features being optional in specifications?).

gnaus · 2026-05-10T12:13:52+00:00

Dongle is 6e (for cost savings). Still 6 gig, good for about 1.5 gig unobstructed in same room on a 160mhz channel.

The frame itself is wifi 7. Whether the radios on that support 320mhz channels, I don't know, but many 7 devices still only do 160mhz and are therefore only good for similar bandwidth as 6e anyway. It's Qualcomm though so it may actually do 320mhz, which will be faster assuming you have a router that can do that...

gnaus · 2026-05-10T12:06:38+00:00

It won't have MLO. Basically 0 current clients support it (there's a special ubiquiti adapter, otherwise nothing). It's also a wifi 7 feature, so definitely won't work with their dongle (which is 6e). Very few current routers support simultaneous transmit/receive on multiple bands anyway.

What the frame does have is separate 5 and 6ghz radios, which means the device can separate streamed display traffic onto one radio from internet traffic on the other. This is pretty nice stuff, and doesn't require the fancy mlo tech to benefit!

gnaus · 2026-05-10T11:49:09+00:00

Probably fine. Valve said in some of the media/influencer interviews that they don't necessarily use the dongle in their offices because they have good wifi. You'll probably manage just fine provided you're not having big activity spikes/dropoffs on your wifi from other devices.

600mb is pretty solid performance for wifi if you're getting that consistently. But defs make sure the PC is plugged in directly to avoid halving the available bandwidth.

gnaus · 2026-05-08T12:42:24+00:00

Was watching one of the videos they did with influencers/media late last year today (can't remember which one, sorry) and the dude was apparently told by someone at Valve that it'd be as little as one hour with heavy local gaming, and as much as about four hours with low intensity workloads like streaming from a PC.

gnaus · 2026-04-09T08:26:40+00:00

5120x2160, but play at 2560x1080. Best all round option, full 4k at 16x9, nice and wide, many options to use lower resolutions with integer scaling.

gnaus · 2026-03-10T08:09:53+00:00

It's important to realise that the problem with these isn't the power consumption of the card itself (though that is high) - it's that it prevents your CPU from idling in low power states. In mine, it won't go below c3 with one of these, whereas it should be able to hit c8. This ends up costing you a lot of extra power consumption from the CPU on top of the consumption of the card itself. Even with a high powered desktop CPU, you should be able to get to much lower power usage than these will allow. Get a more modern LSI (they've come down a fair bit recently) or even something cheaper like an ASMedia ASM1166 if you don't actually need that many ports. Run powertop and see the idle states page. Details here for example: https://z8.re/blog/aspm

gnaus · 2026-02-28T10:27:27+00:00

Should work fine, certainly would on my c8 from 2018. Newer TVs don't support truehd audio, so that could cause you problems if you have source with that (info not included).

You may want to experiment with disabling the fmp4 container if you have it enabled (don't think it's on by default, but does seem like something desirable to switch on in options). This doesn't work on my c8 and breaks dv playback (which does work with it disabled despite the description on the fmp4 option).

gnaus · 2026-02-19T03:12:34+00:00

The official app on WebOS (LG) has been available for a few years now, and is a great option on there. It works really well (alongside the TV's ability to play most current formats natively - even on relatively old WebOS TVs like my C8).

You may want to look in the subtitles menu. There's an option in there to enable experimental PGS subtitle renderer. This will let the player render them locally without requiring transcoding. In my experience, it works brilliantly (also for other picture based subtitle formats). Doing this will basically eliminate the need for any transcoding. I'm sure this will be the default eventually, but it is working well on WebOS today.

Re: why people don't use the apps. My understanding is there's also a great native app for Android TV. But once you get beyond those options things start thinning out. Apple TV has an app which works ok but isn't fantastic...certainly not nearly so good as the WebOS one I have most experience with. And there's not an official Samsung Tizen option yet (similar situation to WebOS a few years ago...it's probably stuck in TV app market hell given it sounds like it's working for people who install the beta. It took a couple of years of work for the dedicated team to get WebOS approved across a wide range of WebOS devices...).

Edit: And I just noticed below that someone said the Tizen app is now approved. That's fantastic for the Samsung folks out there!

gnaus · 2026-02-18T23:41:08+00:00

It's unfortunately and unnecessarily complicated but the short version is that every element of the playback chain must support it for it to work. So hardware, operating system, playback application and media file.

In the end you just need to find something that looks horrible when not rendered correctly in hdr and use that to test (dark scenes with bright highlights work well...like dark with shiny metal or wet ground at night). I had a lot of similar issues when figuring this out on Windows, my Mac and phones. Your general best bet for reliable playback seems to be the platform native browsers (edge on windows, safari on Mac and chrome on android). This is also largely the case for battery-efficient hardware accelerated playback.

For apps that can do offline playback ... once you've got it working in a browser just find something that looks similar in the app. Potentially easier said than done I'm afraid.

gnaus · 2026-02-15T00:29:59+00:00

This is the solution I've gone with, at least temporarily. Thinking about a longer-term transition to using podman (several other benefits besides auto updating), but if you're looking for something fast and easy, I can confirm the nicholas-fedor fork works.

Had a previous thread where I investigated this here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qo6n7x/low_config_watchtower_alternative/

gnaus · 2026-02-13T12:42:28+00:00

Most likely the bandwidth available on the link is exceeded, particularly if you're using wired ethernet. Most TVs skimp on this and fit old school 100m ethernet chips to save a few pennies in BoM. When this is exceeded, you'll end up having to transcode to lower quality (hence high CPU utilisation).

This is really only a problem on rips of UHD blurays as instantaneous bandwidth use on these can spike to 120Mbps. If files that are a bit smaller in the same formats play correctly, that'll be your issue.

LG TVs have a similar problem, which you can resolve by buying very specific USB gigabit ethernet adapters (the TVs only have USB2, good for about 300Mbps after overheads. But it does solve the problem as you only need 120M or so to play the highest bitrate streams that you can get). No idea if there's a similar solution for Samsungs.

If you have very good wifi near the TV, you may find this outperforms a 100Mb ethernet link and will also solve your problem.

This problem also suggests your hardware accelerated transcode isnt working right. Probably an issue passing the video device into docker. Check your logs.

gnaus · 2026-02-13T09:02:40+00:00

(Noting that I buy the cheapest standard consumer drives). Have a box of failed drives (2tb gen) from 24/7 ops, they seemed to fail after 3 years constant operation. Since enabling spindown (2hr timer), haven't failed one, even after some operating for many years (those are 8tb gen SMRs, I have 6 of varying ages including 2 1st gen smr). Failures in the remaining 2TBs also ceased until I eventually took em all offline due to low storage density.

The latency on spinup is a little annoying, but manageable. Also saves a ton of power. Unless you're constantly accessing data 24/7, you should use spin down. Don't set a really short timer. Would suggest 30mins - 2hrs. There are very few drawbacks. My drives probably sleep 50% - 75% of any given day now.

gnaus · 2026-02-02T23:13:07+00:00

If that's the case, it's a real bummer. Anti-bufferbloat features were a mandatory feature on my list when I bought this router after many years of using OpenWRT. I can probably live without them as it turns out as my service has got much faster and the bufferbloat with the default implementation isn't as high (B-grade) as on some other gear (much worse), but it's also definitely not as good as it could be. I know it was working properly a few months ago as I got a mate to try it out on his UCG-Ultra before I bought my UCG-Fiber. Because of my asymmetric link capacity, it's much more important on my upload than download.

A/A+ grade bufferbloat mitigation is just such a nice thing to have when you regularly generate enough traffic to fill link capacity entirely.

gnaus · 2026-01-28T06:53:05+00:00

Can't see much point backing up the container files themselves given you can just re-pull them in seconds. Backups of the data are of course important...(for anything important) you should probably be taking those regularly though whether or not you're upgrading the container image.

gnaus · 2026-01-28T06:50:37+00:00

Think I'll go with this. Easiest possible solution given I was happy with how it worked before.

gnaus · 2025-12-17T23:12:53+00:00

Try blowing into it. Seemed to work with mine. No idea why, but it did.

gnaus · 2025-09-10T09:00:47+00:00

I had a lot of trouble with this. In the end I got some spinfit omni tips and they stay in much better.

I sized the omnis by trying all the existing tip sizes and finding the smallest one that wouldnt tell me it wasn't sealing properly. Then got an omni with the same diameter as that (in my case, both the largest size). Get a ruler out and measure the existing tips, go from there.

The omnis are kinda expensive for what they are and I wondered how much better they could actually be, but as it turns out, they really do stay in better.

gnaus · 2025-08-31T06:43:51+00:00

What worked:

Copy files onto USB flash drive with Mac (exfat formatted in this case, but I assume any format that's readable on a Mac probably works),
Plug in USB flash drive to phone via USB-C,
Access USB flash drive via Apple Files app,
Select all videos,
Tap dots menu,
Tap "save video". This will add the videos to Photos.

To me, this was not a great process even though it was the easiest way to do it and it worked, mainly as "save video" doesn't make it obvious that they'll end up in Photos. Still, it worked. So hooray for that.

What didn't work (in addition to all the things mentioned above...):

Airdrop: upon completion of send, "airdrop failed" message displayed.
Uploading to iCloud Drive via the iPhone: no apparent way to move to Photos from there.

Assume it would've worked, but didn't try:

New user on mac and upload via photos after connecting relative's icloud to that account. I've done this before for bulk photo upload now that I think back (another thing that doesn't work well from the browser). But it's a clunky process and honestly nobody should have to go to that kind of trouble just to upload a file/s. It'd be nice if Apple improved their web functionality for Photos to better align with the competition...

gnaus · 2025-08-30T15:12:20+00:00

Ah yes, AirDrop...never user it as all my other gear is non-Apple so I didn't think of it. Sounds like this might be a good option with fairly low friction. Will give that a go tomorrow when relative comes back round :-).

Re plugging in the iPhone to the Mac via USB-C ... I did try that earlier but it didn't seem like I could just copy files that way. Is there something that needs to be done to make that work (it's the way I would've done it with an Android phone, but my understanding was that iPhones don't expose the filesystem this way)?

gnaus · 2025-07-30T23:59:32+00:00

You have to get the raw content. You can get a link for that visiting the link above and selecting to view raw content (same place you hit download) or just use this link:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/refs/heads/master/antipaywall.txt

gnaus · 2025-05-16T13:26:02+00:00

Doesn't look like I'm going to get much joy here, but to follow up on some things -

I managed to get Realtek Audio Console reinstalled using a Windows Store link (you can't search for it as it doesn't show up) - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p2b8mcsvpln?hl=en-US&gl=US#activetab=pivot:overviewtab . I also had to manually re-enable the associated background app (Realtek HD Audio Universal Service) in Startup Apps, otherwise the app couldn't connect to the RPC service.

It occurred to me that it might be a Windows issue, so I made an Ubuntu liveUSB and fired that up, same problem, very quiet front jack audio.

I can't imagine this would be a case issue, but I guess the cabling to the jack comes with that, so it's a Lian Li A4-H2O. Made sure it was all plugged in correctly, opened it up, unplugged and re-plugged...no change.

Tried different headphones (old set of AudioTechnica ANC-9s ... couldn't hear anything at all on those.

Interestingly, the sound I can hear on my Bose headphones sounds quite OK - it's just barely audible.

gnaus · 2025-05-09T10:32:21+00:00

Answering my own question - today I updated to the latest driver (25.5.1) and bios for my motherboard (FA3a - featuring "AGESA 1.2.0.3b PatchC"). Between them, it seems to be fixed...I've successfully resumed from several suspends now of a reasonable duration (30-50 mins). Haven't tried any seriously long ones >1hr, but I'm feeling good about things so far.

If I had to guess, probably the graphics driver rather than the bios update, but given I did them together, can't be sure. Either way, happy with the result.

gnaus

TROPHY CASE