Never experienced stuttering myself, it's all about tinkering with the optimum settings. And since I use my PC for both work and play it's also turned on 24/7 so it's never a problem with me.
See—I'd rather have highest quality possible with no stuttering. Usually, that means transcoding beforehand, then simply playing back on the PS3. But this means waiting
hours just to, say, let Handbrake rip a DVD then encode as MP4. Much longer for HD MKVs.
Which is why I end up simply paying P1k to P2k for Blu-rays. My time is worth more than that.
Does bandwidth play a big part in smooth playback? Since it's within a LAN should it still be a factor? Maybe someone can explain it further.
Well, if you're like me then you have the PS3 downloading demos/DLC in the background, while at least one PC is torrenting, etc.
From my experience, Blu-ray playback can regularly hit 15-20 Mbit/s. According to
Wikipedia, even just HDTV with MPEG 4 compression uses 8-15 Mbits/s. Its easy to see how even Wireless-G (54 Mbits/s max raw data rate, or 19 Mbits/s throughput) can get saturated.
In short, and going back on topic: media streaming from a PC to the PS3, for me, is a 'duct tape' solution at best.
Until Sony fully supports MKV on the PS3, I think a dedicated NMT (I saw an Xstreamer bundle for only 11k, the unit itself I think retails for as low as 6.5k) is your best bet, if you have lots of MKVs from 'other sources'.
If you plan to invest in a Blu-ray collection, and then have the time to rip those to hard disk in a format the PS3 can play, then maybe the PS3 makes sense.