CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[dturco]

Alright I signed up for Net-Flix. Now what do to do? Yeah I know fill the Quee with movies.

But seriously, I have the Sony BDPs550 which will do Streaming Net Flix , so I guess I need to set up a router to do that . So I am thinking while I'm doing that I can route a 2nd PC too Right?

I do have high speed Internet. I do not know how fast it is, but when we were all testing speeds a while back I was on average with most folks.

Even if I were to by a new Oppo player I would still need the router Right? It's in the thought process.

Will hooking up the second PC or even the Blu-Ray player kill the speed of the first computer?

Moreover, don't I always need a computer somewhere to Stream from/to the Blu-Ray?

What can/should I do?

Yep I've got no clue here. I'm just tired of waiting 6 months to find movies/Blu-Rays cheap enough to buy, since I won't buy regular DVDs anymore.

And renting from the RedBox is just not cutting it. I swear the movies are copies done in poor quality burners.

Or is that just Me?

I've become spoiled by the Blu. What can I say, can you blame me?

Edit: added the Speed test Ping

[AnalogRocks]

Wow 3 times faster than mine. You should be ok for the streaming thing. You'll only notice the slow down on the PC when you are streaming, BUT with that connection you may not notice at all.

Yes you will need a router. Is the BPS-550 wireless? ( I have one but I have no interest in streaming anything in crapy quality.) If it's wireless it makes things easier.

[AnalogRocks]

Wow 3 times faster than mine. You should be ok for the streaming thing. You'll only notice the slow down on the PC when you are streaming, BUT with that connection you may not notice at all.

Yes you will need a router. Is the BPS-550 wireless? ( I have one but I have no interest in streaming anything in crapy quality.) If it's wireless it makes things easier.

[dturco]

No, our Bdp's are not wireless the next gen 560,570 are though. That's why I was thinking about the Oppo supposedly much better scaling and as good, if not better, Blu-ray play back.

[akajester]

A friend of mine was setting up a more modern basement "movie" room. His TV and BD player both have netflix apps. Very nice way to get your streaming fix without a computer. I'm not sure if either of the items you have do that. I just saw a $90 bd player with netflix on slickdeals.net though. nice!

[Sparky015]

for my theatre / family room, I ran a dedicated CAT 6 cable from where my cable modem and router are in my office because I didn't want to go wireless. I didn't think streaming over wireless was going to cut it. I had trouble streaming high-def you-tube videos over wireless. Maybe because I don't have the top end cable bundle, I have middle of the road. Anyway, give me a hard connection over a wireless any day of the week if it's available.

Also, I thought the Netflix streaming thing was 720p, not 1080p. Not sure if you mind that, as it's still better than DVD, but don't expect BR quality streams unless Netflix improved the service and my info is outdated!

[drice1234]

I stream netflix to both my PS3 and blu ray player. I just loaded the iphone app and now stream it to my wifes iphone. It works great with wifi. I have not tested it yet with 3G

[WanMan]

Microsoft Windows XP and above automatically include the QoS Packet Scheduler, which is a fancy smancy software traffic shaper. This means that the PCs running Windows with appropriate version will not attempt to use 100% of available bandwidth.

That being said, only when other devices are actively using the Internet connect will you see (if any) real streaming impact. Of course, you could find a router and install custom firmware to perform traffic shaping on the LAN port, whereby providing an essential minimum bandwidth through your Internet gateway.

But even under those condition you need to realize that once on the public side of your gateway your traffic is no more important than anyone else's in a network designed for consumer broadband.

[kal]

You have to be aware that even if they stream at 1080p, it'll still look worse that 1080p off Blu-ray. The compress the crap out of the image to make it be able to stream. A typical downloaded movie that's 20-30Gb on Blu-ray will only be 2-3Gb when streamed. The result is loss of detail even though the resolution is still 1080p.

Resolution doesn't necessarily equal detail. Bandwidth is equality important. This is sometimes referred to 'temporal resolution'.

Kal

[kal]

You have to be aware that even if they stream at 1080p, it'll still look worse that 1080p off Blu-ray. The compress the crap out of the image to make it be able to stream. A typical downloaded movie that's 20-30Gb on Blu-ray will only be 2-3Gb when streamed. The result is loss of detail even though the resolution is still 1080p.

Resolution doesn't necessarily equal detail. Bandwidth is equality important. This is sometimes referred to 'temporal resolution'.

Kal

[greg_mitch]

[kal]

[kal]

[dturco]

It seems that if i want to try the streaming I will absolutely have to have a router correct?

What the quality of the stream is open to debate but to get streaming I will need the router.

So If I try this at all, which the above posts seem to indicate not to, due to the poor quality of the streaming, it seems that it will be a waste of money doing the router just for the NetFlix.

Does anyone have any direct experience with NetFlix streaming to their P/J at 1080p or I guess desktop if you can see bitrate of the stream?

Honestly if it only streams in at 6-8 mbps it's no better than a DVD.

[kal]

[kal]

[Sparky015]

Good post Kal. I admit, I wasn't up to speed on that. I just thought the resolution wasn't as good. Never crossed my mind to take into consideration how Netflix, or even the cable company packages the signal for delivery to maximize network bandwidth. Makes perfect sense.

[perisoft]

Hell, just go to a Best Buy and look at the demo videos on the HDTVs. They're about equivalent to broadcast quality, but if you look at anything with fast action, you can see high frequency bits blast apart into big squares when the camera pans (think forest backgrounds or stadiums full of people). Static channel logos and caption text on a moving background tend to get murdered, too; they'll shatter into blocks of 1/2 or 1/4 the 'real' spatial resolution.

So, when it comes down to it, a lot of the time the macroblocking is at least 2x2 for any motion scene, which essentially means 1920x1080 comes through as 960x540. Not so hot. In fact, I've seen some comparisons showing digital cable 1080p broadcasts containing substantially less information - and less real physical/temporal resolution - than NTSC OTA. Hell, my sister-in-law's digital cable is so bad that even in standard def, rolling credits leave gray trails behind them.

Youtube's high def actually isn't bad - it's better than a lot of digital cable I've seen.

It's really not about physical resolution, it's about bandwidth. Beyond a certain point, more physical resolution stops mattering and all that matters is the bandwidth used to fill it in. I can give you 4096x2000 content with the same bandwidth as bluray, and it'll look... pretty much like bluray. The only situation in which that isn't the case is where most of the image is very low bandwidth and a small part is very high bandwidth; then having extra spatial resolution allows you to physically display the data contained in that high bandwidth patch.

Aside from special cases, though, bandwidth is more important than resolution, just like Kal says. NTSC itself is bandwidth-limited in the analog domain - severely so - and limited in terms of color options. Blu ray downsampled to 720x480 will still look a hell of a lot better than an NTSC broadcast of the same thing.

There are a lot of axes of factors affecting quality; some alter two characteristics of output and some only one; some combine in odd ways...

My experience with netflix streaming is that it often looks very good - by which I mean close to DVD quality - but falls on its ass in edge cases. Watch Star Trek TOS; it looks pretty good during the shots in the ship. But pans across space or dark scenes are horrifying because low IRE stuff gets clobbered by the compression, and panning stars leave big trails, dark blue colors get posterized to hell and macroblocked up to 32x32 pixel blocks...

I think the algorithms are optimized for common displays. A CRT projector with very good low IRE performance sucks for low bandwidth stuff for the same reason it's stellar at high bandwidth stuff - it shows everything that's there, good or bad. The color quality is good enough to see differences of 1% in the low IREs, and those get delta compressed to hell because it's assumed that people can't see it.

[greg_mitch]

[kal]

[kal]

[MikeEby]

The sad part is full HD audio track alone is 4-7GB that’s larger than audio/video streamed combined. Video is one issue; audio is a whole other matter.

I'm very negative towards streaming, I feel it lowers the standards and is a real compromise, I don't care how convenient it is.

Mike

[kal]

[kal]

[greg_mitch]

[Tom.W]

Redbox now rents blu ray discs. Are you saying they are just copy's ?

Sorry I did read some of this thread but not all I guess.

The one thing I hate about Netflix.............

http://www.netflixsux.com/