Preface

I recently moved to a new place again and went to great lengths to bring my desktop PC over. The problem was that I didn't have a monitor. So a very natural solution was to stream and control the desktop PC over the local network. But at first I didn't have a power strip, so I couldn't use the desktop and the router at the same time. Fortunately, I remembered that Windows can share a wired network over Wi-Fi, effectively acting as a router at the same time. This way, I could put my laptop's 2.5K HDR screen and my iPad's screen to use.

The Problem with Direct Connection

Although the connection bandwidth on the local network was decent, streaming would stutter every so often. Moonlight (the streaming client) suggested lowering the bitrate, but in practice that didn't help. So I pinged the desktop PC's IP directly from the laptop and fed the output data to AI for analysis. It turned out that every 60 seconds, the latency would suddenly jump from around 2 ms to over 200 ms. After analyzing and trying the possible causes suggested by the AI, and after a round of controlled testing, I found that the issue was: when Wi-Fi was enabled on the desktop PC, it would automatically scan for Wi-Fi signals every 60 seconds, causing sudden latency spikes that seriously affected streaming quality.

Solution

To solve this problem, simply disable the Wi-Fi autoconfig feature on the desktop PC (the machine with the hotspot enabled).

First, get the WLAN interface name:

netsh wlan show interfaces

Then run the command with administrator privileges (replace Wi-Fi with the corresponding interface name):

netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="Wi-Fi"

Other than that, no configuration changes are needed on the laptop (the client).