markz said:
Dauntless said:
No cable, no satellite, no 'Mandalorian!' Damn, caught the whole season at relatives last year, if my internet was better I could use my firestick or Roku.
I just purchased Roku today, Roku Premiere Streamer $50(cad) and it just links up to the wireless wifi router.
Not that impressed with it tbh,
edit
It seems like something is slow on my desktop pc with Roku on menu. Might be nothing but did a speed test, could just be low battery with mouse.
50ms Latency * good
227mbps download * good
17mbps upload * good
I watch EVERYTHING via my desktop PC which sits behind my LG CX 65" OLED TV.
Nothing is better than a windows PC for surfing and gaming and a good general multimedia experience.
I admit I have an expensive setup, this is because I play PC games via sofa as well, but any PC with more than one HDMI port can do this for a pretty power home theater setup.
(I admit I copied and pasted about 70% of this below when I described my setup/recommendation to someone else) I know its kind of nerdy/power-user but I think it is the future.
For good home theater setups a graphics card that has as many DisplayPort/HDMI ports as possible is helpful, any DisplayPort can double as an HDMI port.
https://static.tweaktown.com/news/7/5/75589_05_gigabyte-reveals-high-end-custom-aorus-rtx-3080-3090-cards_full.jpg
^Since HDMI 2.1 has come out, the latest cards are adding an increasing amount of HDMI ports, but generally, you get one dedicated HDMI port, and if you need more just use any converter/cable.
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/DP-DisplayPort-Male-To-HDMI-Female-4K-Adapter-Cable-Converter-PC-TV-Projector/274426593291
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/4K-2K-DisplayPort-DP-to-HDMI-Cable-Male-to-Male-Cord-With-Audio-UltraHD-1-8M/321645962248
Such setups, depends on how high end you want to go, HDMI 2.1 TV's are the most expensive right now since they are new technology, but strictly speaking, they don't help much for movie watching as it really helps the gaming experience above anything else.
With my LG OLED CX 65inch with HDMI 2.1 ports I have a NVidia RTX 3080 with HDMI 2.1 ports as well. So I can watch stuff in 4k 120fps with HDR, currently, the only time this really happens is when I am gaming, or if I record and play something back from a high-end Gopro etc.
You don't want a sound-card period, I even disable the motherboard sound in the bios of my PC.
As long as you have a AV-receiver with HDMI input then use all sound via your graphics card, everything else is just backwards or of FAR less audio quality or if you sit in front of your PC with headphones etc.
All audio on or going to your PC is digital, so it just gets passed through your CPU to HDMI port to your AV-receiver digitally, anything else is old junky ways of doing things.
Since Windows 10 Microsoft has basically made it impossible to get surround sound out via any other method than HDMI port, this is deliberate as this is the only real official standard for high-quality audio, everything else is a hack.
The great thing about PC's for home theatre setups is because you get multiple HDMI outs, you can plug one of your HDMI outputs from your graphics card directly into your AV-receiver and not have to stuff about with "pass-through" and wondering if your AV-receiver is picking up the full surround sound etc, the graphics card will always send everything at full quality 8channel PCM at a minimum. I have been using this setup for a LONG TIME and if the video source in question has surround sound then you will get it EVERY TIME, it will never fail.
https://imgur.com/om83p3h
https://i.imgur.com/HhPAHfS.png
I have a Yamaha AV receiver with full-sized 5.1 surround-sound Jamo speaker set and I am religious about getting full surround sound when it is available, if I don't get it then I kind of view it as a crime.
When you have your AV-receiver directly plugged into your graphics card, the PC will see that AV-receiver as a monitor/TV as well.
So I have the AV receiver merged with a smaller side TV https://imgur.com/U4EYnxn so they both receive the same data (in theory).
This allows me to bring up something on Netflix/Stan/Amazon-Prime etc and "drag and drop" the video to my smaller side TV to see if the content is any good, then browse social-media/news etc on my main screen.
I kind of see just a single screen or the lack of the ability to not have multiple sources of video on my setup at the same time as old-school/backwards. If you are a power-user then once you get used to this setup you can't go back, it's like giving up broadband and going back to dial-up, or moving back to a lifestyle with no air-conditioning, IMO.
Most of the time I do everything via the web-browser, all the major services fully-support web-browser including HDR with 4k.
Only the most extremely tech-illiterate people who don't know how to use Google etc don't know that.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/42384
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931
Netflix is available in HDR on Windows computers and tablets using the Microsoft Edge browser or the Netflix app for Windows.
https://imgur.com/VLa9ibl
For blocking adverts I use uBlock Origin which works just as well as Brave web-browser, for the most part.
https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ublock-origin/odfafepnkmbhccpbejgmiehpchacaeak
But there are also dedicated apps
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/p/netflix/9wzdncrfj3tj?activetab=pivot
verviewtab
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/p/stan/9nblggh4wz0p
I tried to like KODI, and it's clever how it can download/update scripts to make stuff happen, but I still think it's just for cheap $30 Android boxes for folks who want a traditional TV setup and don't browse the web or engage in social media etc.
I have been trialling subscribing to more interesting news sites and KODI support probably doesn't exist. https://censored.tv/
When I used KODI I noticed it uses a super-tiny amount of ram, it is designed from the ground up for super basic cheap hardware that typically struggles with the web-browser intensive web-sites.
AV1 compressed video is definitely here and working, AV1 provides the same video quality at HALF the bandwidth.
Practically, all high-end video with HDR has an AV1 codec option on YouTube which will automatically come through if you have a RTX 30XX GPU or latest Intel chip, AMD's new GPU should support AV1 as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware
Nvidia: GeForce 30
Intel: Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/97r5wzn3?p=899#r17965
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-av1-decoding/
https://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/youtube-av1.html
Amazon Prime and Netflix have also promised to fully support AV1 as well, but I haven't seen anything yet.
For HDMI 2.1 setup, I think it can wait if you want to use second-hand gear, the video cards that can do it have just come out and probably dropping in price by around 5% a month, and will only get better.
You can start off by using any kind of PC plug it into your TV and start experimenting from there.
Also, you can use an "air-mouse" which is a remote that moves like a regular mouse in the air.
http://www.riitek.com/product/mx8.html
I fully replaced my Logitech Harmony remote with just a simple $15 air mouse via ir-learning because all I need to do is turn on/off my main TV, smaller side TV, my Yamaha amp and PC on.
I can also control the Yamaha's master volume via this remote.
All I did was use the classic IR learning method to teach the colored buttons at the top what to do.
The PC wakes up/down from USB hibernation mode settings in the bios which for me are off by default, so I had to turn on "wake from USB" or something similar.
Some people fail on the basics, I have lost count how many times I have seen people squint on their PC web-browser because they browser everything in default zoom mode which is optimized for skinny mobile phones. A zoom level of 150% is about right for most resolutions now when using a screen PC as a regular desktop...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bqtIklkWD8
Also scaling, if you are on 4k TV on a sofa you need to go to 200% scaling, by default my Windows 10 does this for my LG CX OLED.
https://www.howtogeek.com/304036/HOW-TO-ADJUST-SCALING-FOR-DIFFERENT-MONITORS-IN-WINDOWS-10/
If you are interested in this kind of setup I can post more. :wink:
