Replacing Direct TV with Netflix and PC for News & Entertainment Center

[Skuzzy]

Ghastly, most, if not all, BluRay players suck at playing DVD's.  Marketing at work there.  I plugged a DVD into a PS3 once, and I could not get the disk out fast enough due to the playback being so atroscious when compared to a decent quality DVD player.

[Masherbrum]

Ghastly, most, if not all, BluRay players suck at playing DVD's.  Marketing at work there.  I plugged a DVD into a PS3 once, and I could not get the disk out fast enough due to the playback being so atroscious when compared to a decent quality DVD player.

Correct.   Gaming Consoles should not "double" as DVD players.  Why?   The carrier mechanisms are designed for games, but the companies make money off of folks for "also being a Blu-Ray/DVD player, etc".   

[Skuzzy]

Oh, I understand why they suck at playing DVD's.  I knew it before I plugged in a disc it would be bad, I was just taken a back by how bad it really was.  Made NTSC over antennae look good.

[Masherbrum]

Oh, I understand why they suck at playing DVD's.  I knew it before I plugged in a disc it would be bad, I was just taken a back by how bad it really was.  Made NTSC over antennae look good.

Absolutely.   


Also Mar, I was with DirecTV for 10 years and switched to AT&T U-Verse.   I just wanted faster internet and got their bundle.   I do NOT regret the switch.

[Tigger29]

My Samsung BR does a beautiful job with DVDs.  It does a MUCH MUCH better job at upconverting a DVD to 1080p, and they look 100 times better than playing a DVD from a normal DVD player and allowing the TV to do the "upconversion".  However, I don't own an upconverting DVD player, but the DVD picture is getting pretty close (although not quite as nice) as a BR picture.  I was pleasantly surprised how nice the Samsung does with the DVD upconversion.  I can't imagine the image would have been 'sabotaged' in any way, shape, or form... but I wouldn't put it against other BR manufacturers to follow these types of practices.

BR disks are absolutely beautiful.. definitely better than DVD's.

With that being said, streaming Netflix through my Samsung BR player works out quite nice (6Mb internet - uverse)... I would put its SD content somewhere close to, but not quite DVD quality.  When I find a HD stream I find it to be slightly better than DVD quality, but definitely not BR quality.

Seems about on par with Skuzzy's posts...

[Ghastly]

I wonder if it isn't the Samsung BlueRay player that makes such a difference in perceived quality?  Tigger's description of how he tiers the quality echo's my own sentiments exactly.  BlueRay is best (by quite a bit), Netflix HD is IMHO somewhat better than COMCAST HD channels which is somewhat better than DVD, DVD is better than Netflix SD (by a decent margin), Netflix SD is still better than Comcast OnDemand HD (possibly because every time I watch an ONDemand transmission at some point it goes all squirrelly), all of which beats Comcast "standard" quality channels all hollow, with Comcast "standard" ON-demand being the very bottom of the barrel in picture quality - I'd almost rather not watch anything than watch something I want to watch on On-Demand.

I would not have necessarily tiered them this way when we were using the computer as the player - there was a tremendous difference in perceived quality of Netflix.  I'm also not entirely sure that I ever saw anything that actually streamed in HD when using the computer as the player, even when it was available in HD.  And our Internet service hasn't changed - I have (and have had all along) 16 Mb/s up and 2 down.

Shrug... Dunno. What I do know is that I'm very happy with what I got, and for a grand total of 16.99 per month for 3 DVD's at a time and unlimited Instant Play, Netflix is the absolute best bargain of the lot.

Mar, I can't answer on using the game console as a BlueRay player.  I know the PS and PS2 suck as a DVD player, but I don't have a 360 or a PS3 - if I had one I might have tried it at some point, but I sure wouldn't have "planned" to use one.

<S>
 

[Ack-Ack]

In my TV room, we use a PS3 for a Blu-Ray player and in the bedroom, we have a Samsung Blu-Ray player (same model TV in both rooms, Sony Bravia 32") and honestly, as visual qualities go, the Blue-Ray movies played on the PS3 look no different in quality than those played on the Samsung Blue-Ray player.  We also use the PS3 and the Samsung player to stream Netflix and we've been happy with the quality of the video, though we do stream in Netflix HD.

ack-ack

[Ghastly]

OMG.  It's been a while since I used a computer to view Netflix (3 or 4 months).  I just can't believe the difference as compared to the Samsung BlueRay player.  On the computer (I tried both the new ATI 4870-based Win 7 gaming system, and the older but still quite serviceable NVidia 9800GTX based AMD gaming system I replaced and both were equally bad), and it's not much better than watching YouTube.  The same exact movie (The great Panda Adventure) on the TV via the BlueRay player is at least DVD and I think actually better than that quality.  On the computer, it's all the bad things about video over the Internet.

I can only say that played on the TV being driven off the computer at the "normal" viewing distance Netflix didn't look quite that bad (especially as it didn't fill the screen), although it wasn't stellar by any means - but 2 feet from a 24" monitor played through a computer it looks simply godawful.

Bottom line, though - you cannot judge how this is going to look when played through a NetFlix ready device by how it looks played through a computer - there is just no comparison.

Numbers.  Standard (on the computer) was using 1.9 Mb/s, while HD (on the BlueRay Player) was 3.3 Mb/s (estimated margin of error of ~ +/- 5%).    ** I noticed something that I thought I'd seen before, but wasn't sure - much of the content that shows as HD on the BlueRay players Instant Queue only plays in SD when played on the computer - but it's HD when played on the "Netflix Ready device".

<S>

[Skuzzy]

Sounds like they are doing 480p HD.  3.3Mb/s at any resolution higher than that would artifact like crazy.  The BluRay player would do a 3:2 pullup to get it to 720p.

[Eagler]

Resolution is not an issue to be concerned with as Netflix streams are highly lossy to reduce the amount of data.  All a high resolution output is going to do is show the flaws/artifacts better.

I tried Netflix once, but it was painful to watch on my 55" television.

Once you get used to a non-compressed 1080p stream, going to Netflix is like going back to an NTSC broadcast.  I realize some, if not most, people do not care about the actual physical quality of the content they watch (people are happy to watch movies on thier phones!), but I do care.

Plus, I hate what these services are doing to the Internet.

what he said - Netflix is only good to rent Blu ray dvds to play in the ps3 - their streaming is crap unless you liked Divx and that is on a Road Runner lightning connection.

[Ghastly]

Eagler, was that to a "Netflix-Ready device" - or to a computer?  What I'm seeing is that the difference between them is night and day - computer is something like DIVX quality, but the BlueRay player streams somewhere near DVD (SD) or exceeds DVD quality (HD).

It seems bizarre to me that the 165$ Netflix-Ready BlueRay player could "outperform" my near top of the line gaming system on raw performance - and by a margin that's almost reminiscent of comparing Nintendo 64 to a Wii.  I feel like it almost has to be deliberate.

When I switched from the laptop to the BlueRay player, I attributed the huge improvement in quality to the fact that the laptop had a mobile gpu, was connected VGA rather than DVI or HDMI, and wouldn't support the native resolution of the TV on VGA- all of which changed with the BR player.   

Last night I found that even the new Win 7 system is just as poor as the laptop - albeit on it's own 24" monitor rather than the TV. 

<S>

[Skuzzy]

It cannot exceed DVD quality at 3.3Mb/s, or 4Mb/s.  Full DVD streams between 6 and 8Mb/s using MPEG2 compression and that is for a 480i stream.

Using MPEG4/H.264 the best you could hope for at 480p, would be a stream rate of 8 to 10 Mb/s.  480p is the lowest defined resolution for HD.  Anything lower than that is DVD, or less.

Mathematically, the HD stream is approaching near DVD quality at 4Mb/s.  The only gain over DVD would occur if the source started in the digital realm as virtually all DVD's were from an analog source (except for many modern animated features).