Why is my game stream pixelated or corrupted over Wi-Fi?

The stream looks sharp, then a corner turns into grey blocks, the blocks drag across the screen when the camera moves, and it takes seconds to clear. In a shooter that is a lost round; in a racing game it is a wall.

Lowering the bitrate makes the whole picture soft all the time to avoid a corruption that only happens sometimes. Raising it makes the corruption worse. Neither is the fix.

And you are never told why: was it the Wi-Fi, the PC’s encoder, or the phone falling behind?

Video streams send most frames as differences from the previous one. If a packet from one frame is lost, that frame is decoded with a hole, and every following frame builds on the hole — the smear — until a key frame arrives and resets the picture. Wi-Fi loses packets in bursts, so the damage tends to come in clusters.

There are only three honest answers: get the lost pieces back (forward error correction), refuse to decode a frame that is not whole (an integrity check), and ask for a key frame immediately rather than waiting for the next scheduled one.

1. 01

   Let the regulator see the loss

   ChimpDeck’s regulator watches losses on the side that sees them and raises repair (FEC) and lowers bitrate live, without reconnecting, then puts them back when the link recovers. The stats overlay shows what it did and why.

2. 02

   Repair before you skip

   Lost packets are rebuilt from parity data. The app verifies the host’s parity scheme against real data before ever using it to rebuild a frame, so a repair is never a guess.

3. 03

   Check every frame

   With ChimpDeck for Windows every frame carries a checksum of the encoded picture. A frame that does not match is never handed to the decoder; a key frame is requested at once and re-requested every 500 ms.

4. 04

   Never decode half a picture

   After any gap, nothing is fed to the decoder until the key frame arrives, and late packets from older frames are ignored instead of poisoning the current one. The result is a brief freeze, not blocks.

5. 05

   Fix the link where you can

   Wire a TV box; on a phone the app enables Android’s low-latency Wi-Fi mode during a session. On a TV the same causes show up as judder — here is that side of it — and these settings are a good start.

6. 06

   Keep the session through a bad patch

   If the picture stops entirely, the host pauses for up to 10 minutes and the app reconnects into the same game — how that works.

• Corruption cannot stick

  A damaged frame is repaired or skipped, never shown. The smear that lasts until the next key frame simply does not happen.

• Repair that adapts

  FEC requested live by the side that sees the losses, verified against real data before use.

• A cause in words

  The PC panel says «the phone asks to repair: check the network» or «the PC isn’t keeping up» — not just a number.

• Bitrate that comes back

  Quality drops only while the link is bad and returns on its own; no reconnect.