Is a wireless G connection fast enough to pump HDTV Data to a notebook?

Factual Questions
1

The Wireless G spec seen on most wireless routers these days allows for approx 54 megs per second in theory, and (based on my experiences) about one half to one quarter that *at best * in real life assuming a perfect connection.

Assuming you had some way to convert the HDTV signal to a wireless broadcast in your house, is this fast enough to stream an HDTV quality picture to a notebook? If the G speed level won’t cut it will the new wireless “N” spec be fast enough?

2

An HDTV channel is generally considered to have a theoretical max of 19.4 Mbps, with a practical rate more like 17-18.

So it might work, or it might not. Note that the feed coming in is already compressed, so your laptop needs to be powerful enough to decompress it.

802.11n should have an attainable speed of 200 Mbit/s, which would be sufficient.

3

You may already know this, but it’s not clear from your phrasing. Network speeds are generally listed in Mbps which is Megabits per second. A Megabit is not the same as a Megabyte (which is what is usually understood by phrasing such as “54 megs per second”).

Wireless G is capable of transferring 6.75 Megabytes per second of data. This is probably why your experiences are showing you one quarter of your expected speed in real life.

Often I hear from people with their 4Mbps high speed internet connection, wondering why they can’t download a 4MB file in one second?

Beware of bits vs. bytes

4

I doubt it. I’ve tried streaming movies from my desktop to my laptop over a wireless-G connection and it lagged quite a bit at times. These were standard Divx-encoded AVI files around 700MB, roughly 480 x 300.

5

It’s highly unlikely that that is a netword bandwidth issue. For one thing, I’ve done exactly what you’re suggesting many times without hiccups. Secondly, a movie that is say, 100 minutes long and 700MB in file size, only needs 7MB per minute to sustain that streaming. That can easily be had on even the old Wireless-B standard.

Now, when you’re talking about a high resolution TV show that is maybe 30 minutes long, with a file size of 300-400MB, you’re getting a little closer to the limitations.

6

Let me throw out VLC player as a great, lightweight, open source, and free media player that works very well for streaming video over the network.