Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

Sorry for muddying up the thread with politics. Jeff is right. Politics can turn friends into enemies. Let's not go there ;)

Steve, she seems to like the Roku. She's not very tech savvy at all. It's a VERY simplistic user interface. Even a child or monkey could figure it out. I was under the impression that it was a general media player. Not one usb port! It merely excepts a wifi signal. And on top of that, you have to register on Roku.com, and submit your credit card information, in case you decide to use/purchase channels in the store. Thankfully, it requires a numerical code (4 characters) to purchase things. She has children over often.

---

Originally posted by Estuansis:

---

And here I sit with basic cable... Never invested in a Blu-Ray player or a Smart TV. Happy with my HDMI cable routed through the ceiling from the file box... PS3 sitting around for the odd disc-based media.

---

Originally posted by ZoSoIV:

---

Finally my 4 plus year old Plextox PX-810 drives gave out the good news is the Asus sata drives DRW-24B1ST are cheap 33.98 for both shipped from newegg

---

Quote:

---

If you want to try and really push things overclocking it, you should probably add something like

---

Originally posted by FredBun:

---

Question for you guys with the roku's or whatever other ways to go about it I think it's called streaming, I'm new to most of it, a neighbor of mine just got into it, he bought a sony bluray wifi player with the netflix capability, after he set it up which by the way the wireless network part was a nightmare, but a nice collection of tv viewing, but the quality was a little like watching a vhs tape, do you guys have the same experience.

---

Originally posted by Sam:

---

Correct, 24" 1080p (which, by the way, PC monitors have been doing for over 8 years) is the same density as 4k but the larger resolution allows that quality of detail to fill more of your field of view - I.e. sit closer or have a bigger screen and still have the same crisp image.

---

Originally posted by FredBun:

---

....... but the quality was a little like watching a vhs tape, do you guys have the same experience.

---

Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

Our viewing experience can vary on netflix. It uses a wifi dongle, and we get a 5Mb connection. I noticed last night, that what they were watching was obviously cropped from a wider aspect, to 16:9. That would cause video to look slightly blockier. Essentially, you're zooming in on the video a bit. I heard netflix was doing this not long ago. Cropping the video :( I suggest trying to stream a video, that has HD available(Provided you're at least 5Mb), and seeing how that looks. I believe 7Mb is the recommended minimum though. Which is laughable. Because I've streamed HD at 5Mb, looks really good, and it isn't utilizing my full bandwidth. Roughly 85%, but that likely depends on the compression scheme of the video I'm watching.

Resolution isn't necessarily the determining factor. The Bitrate of the video frames/audio is what's most important. 500kB/s seems to be plenty, for intelligently compressed video. Don't get me wrong though, I'd much prefer upwards of 12Mb! Unfortunately, I have to live with what I can get ;)

---

Originally posted by sammorris:

---

Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

Our viewing experience can vary on netflix. It uses a wifi dongle, and we get a 5Mb connection. I noticed last night, that what they were watching was obviously cropped from a wider aspect, to 16:9. That would cause video to look slightly blockier. Essentially, you're zooming in on the video a bit. I heard netflix was doing this not long ago. Cropping the video :( I suggest trying to stream a video, that has HD available(Provided you're at least 5Mb), and seeing how that looks. I believe 7Mb is the recommended minimum though. Which is laughable. Because I've streamed HD at 5Mb, looks really good, and it isn't utilizing my full bandwidth. Roughly 85%, but that likely depends on the compression scheme of the video I'm watching.

Resolution isn't necessarily the determining factor. The Bitrate of the video frames/audio is what's most important. 500kB/s seems to be plenty, for intelligently compressed video. Don't get me wrong though, I'd much prefer upwards of 12Mb! Unfortunately, I have to live with what I can get ;)

---

The problem is, even if you have 7Mbps, it may not be 7Mbps all the time - they have to allow for variances in speed that ISPs will consider 'normal behaviour' and still deliver an acceptable experience, otherwise they'll be had over for false advertising. 720p on youtube is actually between 2100-2900kbps bitrate in almost all cases.

Fred: It can seem complicated at first, but is actually fairly simple. A few pointers:

Quality is primarily determined with bitrate. The higher the bitrate the better the quality, up to the limit of the resolution. Once you have a perfectly clear image (or close enough such that you can't tell the difference) your next limit is the resolution determining how small the pixels are in the image. On a large HDTV, at 720p 'high definition' the pixels are still very large. Moving to 1080p includes twice as many pixels in the same space - smaller pixels = a finer image, but if the file bitrate is too low, you may as well have 720p as it won't look good enough to justify the extra resolution.

Rich: Super-sharp, and super small. Remember Windows still doesn't really have proper DPI scaling. It's there, but it's a bit dodgy and it makes windows look odd, I don't use it. The higher the dots-per-inch with windows, the smaller everything gets, as things like the start menu are always a standard number of pixels - therefore with more pixels per inch, the start menu is fewer inches wide.

---