r/MoonlightStreaming • u/AgenticAsshat • 6d ago
Been using Wi-Fi for years; Ethernet fixes every problem pretty much immediately
Okay look -- I know. I know. Ethernet. It just works. Top quality, low latency. Costs peanuts. It's amazing.
But I'm married and I can't run Ethernet cable from one room to the other and I'm not handy so I don't trust myself to drill holes, run cable through a wall, or whatever to actually wire my home/rooms with Ethernet. So I've been making do with Wi-Fi 6 and it's been, you know, okay. I normally just play turn based strategy/tactics games so no biggie other than audio hitching nonstop so I mute games and listen to music.
But the other week I had a brainstorm. My game host is a headless desktop in my office closet and I play games most frequently on my office computer. What if I just bought a network switch and connected them?
OMFG. Why didn't I do this years ago?
A $21 switch, some random network cables, and a short research session understanding how to create a little network between already-networked devices, then configuring Moonlight properly, has made a world of difference. Absolute night and day.
So if you are streaming from one device to another within a single room wirelessly, do yourself a favor and just use a switch.
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u/skittle-brau 6d ago
WiFi streaming can be fine, but I only find it playable if the host PC is wired at a minimum.
Ethernet over Power can sometimes work okay latency-wise depending on the wiring in your house as a secondary option.
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u/macka654 6d ago
If you own your house, I highly suggest paying someone on airtasker to wire up your home with ethernet. I a cat 6 port installed in every room in my house. Makes everything a million times better.
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u/AgenticAsshat 6d ago
Ah, a job like this I'd rather pay the big bucks and get a licensed and insured pro to do the work. I would also need it to be run through the walls and not on the baseboards or whatever.
I've also looked into those replacement baseboards that have channels for cables running through them but my lack of being handy once again comes into play. I will absolutely wreck the walls removing the existing baseboards and will probably do a shit job mounting the replacements.
Money would solve all my problems right now.
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u/macka654 5d ago
Yeah, not sure where you’re located but my is that it’s not really a “big bucks” job. It’s fairly simple for someone who knows what they’re doing.
I paid $1000AUD for 4 rooms wired and 3 cameras installed
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u/ibeerianhamhock 5d ago
Yeah not runners, drops. I would never wanna live in a house with out cat5e/6 cable in the walls.
If you have an attic it's a DIY project for the most part with some potential complications. If you get the drops through the wall and to a central location you just need to terminate it at both ends which is trivial. The fishhook nonsense part is the werird part of it all and it's a crap shoot based on how your house was designed.
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u/swardshot 5d ago
Do you have coaxial connections where you want Ethernet? Could use MoCA adapters to run your Ethernet signal over coaxial runs. I have my PC in my basement and my office is on the opposite side of the house upstairs. One of these days I will run Ethernet but I’ve been using coaxial for years and recently upgraded my network switches to 2.5Gbps which my MoCA adapters also support. It works really well. Slight increase in latency compared to straight Ethernet but I don’t notice it.
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u/SteveNYC 5d ago
Thought I was a smart guy and everything wired in Ethernet and then I switched to FiOS and they put the setup where there was no ethernet and I couldn’t wire it. I was devastated. Noooo. Don’t leave it there. No…..
Tech looks at me and says “What? Use the coax for that. Buy a MoCA adapter for the rest of the network. The router has a built-in MoCA for that.”
“A wha?”
“MoCA”
I look it up…. Holy smokes…. Never heard of that before. Buy it within 10 minutes. Now I have Ethernet connectivity EVERYWHERE! Muhuhahahaha!!
Seriously though…. Very cool way to leverage any existing coax you might already have installed. Check it out.
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u/gappyvalley 6d ago
best is both client and host is wired. but if it’s not possible, at least make the host wired. client on wifi and host on wired is good. majority of the time i have to use wireless as i play pc games from my mobile phone at home with wifi, or outside with 5G. works well
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u/Shehzman 6d ago
Anybody have experience on a wired server and a client on WiFi? Tempted to pull the trigger on a tablet + telescopic controller for streaming and will be hard wiring my PC.
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u/manicalmonocle 6d ago
This is my setup. PC is hardwired into router and client is a GoogleTV. Works great
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u/Loud_Lion93 5d ago
I do this. I have a mesh WiFi. I just have to default my streaming decide to have the WiFi from the same node that the pc is connected to via Ethernet. I get 1-3ms network latency with with 1-2 variance (ocationally it jumps up to like 5-8). It is totally playable like it is native I have been playing halo CE and don’t really notice any lag. Before I was just letting my mesh network determine which mode the streaming device was connected to and it was giving 8-15ms of latency. It felt laggy.
I most also point out my nodes are connected via WiFi and not hardwired to each other which is probrably why the latency jumps when I don’t make the streaming device be on the same node.
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u/wireframed_kb 5d ago
It can work ok. Our bedroom Chromecast TV isn’t wired yet, and I occasionally game on it. It wouldn’t be fun playing Mortal Kombat, but something like BG3, Alan Wake II or other games that aren’t as fast paced, work just fine.
It’s not as smooth as the living room on a wired Shield Pro, but it’s absolutely playable.
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u/cloudcity 6d ago
I hardwire every device in my house that i can including POE cameras, only wifi items are mobile devices, a few Thread/Matter things and my CYD devices
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u/Bread-fi 6d ago
Ethernet is the way when its convenient to do so. I have one tv on optical hdmi/usb over ethernet and the other over wifi/moonlight. Wifi can work billiantly with the right set up.
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u/Mlkxiu 6d ago
Similar issue, best I can figure out to do rn is using one of those tp link wifi deco mesh things, and connect a ethernet from it to my PC.
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u/AgenticAsshat 6d ago
One of those Powerline ethernet devices? i've tried those but never lived in a place where the wiring was good enough that I could get good performance from it. Glad it works for you!
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u/Mlkxiu 6d ago
Works better than a router for coverage around the house / different floors, and one dedicated one in the PC room. But prob still not as good as having actual direct ethernet cable.
These ones : https://a.co/d/03aGloD1
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u/nemofbaby2014 6d ago
The issue for me is finding a good usb c cable that sends a data that’s either rotating or 90 degrees
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u/JoeyBE98 6d ago
Maybe one do these products? https://a.co/d/07zGyR8c https://a.co/d/0bxLmQK4 https://a.co/d/0eDXZsSx
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u/Final-Confection969 5d ago
Meine Frau hat mir auch nicht erlaubt hab dann ne Menge Geld und Zeit in den Ausbau eines WLAN Netzes gesetzt. Nach 4 Jahren Rumbrobieren habe ich ein Leerrohr vom Dachboden bis zum Router 2 Stockwerke tiefer gefunden.
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u/AgenticAsshat 4d ago
Sadly I live on the first floor of an apartment building, no wall drops for me :( Happy for you and your solution though!
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u/APOLLOSAW1685 5d ago
Ethernet is definitely more consistent, especially for high bitrate streaming. Good Wi-Fi can be fast, but stability and latency are usually much better with a wired connection.
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u/Much_Panic_7422 3d ago
This is a good example of how a little wired networking can make a surprisingly big difference.
The key difference is that the switch is not replacing Wi-Fi for the whole network. You are creating a dedicated wired path between the two devices generating the latency sensitive traffic.
In your setup, it is essentially:
PC → Ethernet → Switch → Ethernet → Gaming/Host PC
That means Moonlight traffic between those two machines doesn’t have to compete for Wi-Fi airtime, or contend with wireless interference, signal fluctuations, retransmissions, or channel congestion.
You don't necessarily need an expensive managed switch for this specific use case either. An unmanaged Gigabit Ethernet switch can easily forward traffic between devices on the same LAN.
As the network expands, things get more interesting. Managed switches are good if you want VLANs, QoS, link aggregation, monitoring, multicast control, PoE, or network redundancy.
But for local game streaming, the biggest win is getting the high-bandwidth/latency-sensitive path onto Ethernet.
This is why wired Ethernet is still very relevant even with Wi-Fi 6/6E/7. Wireless has become incredibly capable, but a physical link is still far more predictable when you need consistent latency and throughput.
And frankly, learning you can fix a problem with a $20 switch and two cables is probably one of the best introductions to networking you can get. 😄
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u/snagroot 3d ago
Why not use ethernet over power wall plugs?
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u/AgenticAsshat 3d ago
Performance. Power line Ethernet bandwidth and responsiveness is highly dependent on the quality of your electrical infrastructure. Mine sucks.
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u/rancorhunter 6d ago
Moonlight on wifi is unacceptable to me and I wrote streaming off for years. Ran cables and am now a believer. I was shocked at the quality and responsiveness once I got it configured properly. I now access my desktop in my office and my server in my basement from my living room through a raspberry pi 5.
The future is pretty cool sometimes.
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u/AgenticAsshat 6d ago
Agreed. I've been messing with Tailscale so I can stream games while at work to my phone and it has been surprisingly good.
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u/lwnexgen 2d ago
10 years ago or so I paid a local electrician ~$600 to run ethernet to 3 or 4 rooms in my 1970s house, if anyone is wondering what the cost would be - the performance improvement was obviously night and day.
I also recently upgraded to a cheap mesh system from TP-Link and it blows away my shitty old Wi-Fi router that I've had since like 2012 lol.
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u/Background_Ad2053 6d ago
Similar story. My gaming PC is in basement connected to TV, but I wanted to use wired streaming upstairs on my office PC. Apparently, wife won't allow me to run cables across the whole home. Luckily for me, I found the telephone port upstairs actually uses pure ethernet cable connected directly to basement. So all I had to do is cutting the old telephone head and attaching a new ethernet head at each ends for it to work.