Howard2k

It depends on how the video is encoded and what else is going on, on the network.

802.11b won't be the bottleneck, it'll be the axim accepting the information from the network, passing to Media Player and having Media Player decode and present the information.

802.11b is 11Mb/s (not MB/s) of bandwidth. But effectively being a half-duplex technology using CSMA/CA you will typically never see more than 5.5Mb/s. The X3/X30 range seem to be able to transfer up to around 2Mb/s over wifi. That is uploading and downloading files etc. Then you need to add additional overhead for moving the stuff around through the memory and Windows Media Player (or Betaplayer or whatever else you are using) doing its processing.

So 802.11b is plenty of bandwidth. It's all the other factors that will present issues.

I haven't seen any decent testing what are "good" limits to place on the size of the stream so I can't give you a decent answer. I would wildly speculate anywhere from 500Kb/s to 750Kb/s should give you a good compromise of skipping vs quality.

But give it a shot and see :)

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cherokee180c

Thanks for the very informative response. Since you seem to know a lot about this subject, I would like to find out a work around for an issue. There are a ton of streaming video sites available from a PC, which I believe use file formats that WM10 can deal with. The problem I have is that I can not get to most of those sites through PIE either due to the site knowing you are a PDA and automatically redirecting you to the PDA content site, or because of the fact that the site has some type of other programing (Java?) that PIE can not deal with. I would like to be able to get to these sites and watch the news clips etc. from the X50v. Is there a way or a program to pass through the streaming video from the PC back out over wifi to the PDA? Or is there a beter browser for the X50v that will allow you to get to the streaming video choices on the net? I am a comcast customer right now and they have a nice set of videos available from their home page that I can not get to because it says I need to update my browser when I try to access from the PDA.

Howard2k

Windows Media Encoder would allow you to stream through the PC to the PPC.

So the PC opens the stream (say WMP), and WME re-encodes it and re-transmits it to the PPC which can then display it (WMP).

There are various ways to do it. This is one, but may not be the best.

The challenge is, how do you get the PC to open the stream?? An idea might be to VNC to the PC, have it open the stream and then have the PPC view the stream via WMP. It's messy messy messy.

An easier way to think about the problem is streaming audio (also can be doen via WME). The PC takes the audio and streams it with WME, but to the PPC it's just a sequence of UDP packets. The PPC just listens, it doesn't send a message upstream saying "I don't like that song, skip it".

Anyway - many many ways to do it. That's one. Great for audio. For long video it's good too. For opening various short streams it's a PITA.

You could also reconfigure the PPC to report a different browser version. It will prevent you from viewing PPC formatted websites.

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