Need Help! I want to watch ESPN 360 Football on my HDTV!

[johnrr6]

AV guys----I need help and suggestions!!

A little background first:

I LOVE Nebraska Football! Born there, grew up there, played there, (well, all of three weeks on the Freshmen team) but I digress---I love the Huskers and I live and die Nebraska Football every Fall Saturday much to the amusement of my Southern Belle wife who just doesn't "get it".

Football to a Nebraskan is MORE than football-----it's just a way of life...

Anyway----I live in VIRGINIA now----and trying to stay up with the Huskers on Saturdays out here on the East Coast is tough.

Well----along comes the miracle of ESPN 360 on the internet and virtually every Nebraska game this year has been available on it. So me being the family "Techie"-----I hooked a laptop with VGA out to the VGA in of my HP MediaSmart 42 inch High Def (1080p) TV.

The laptop had a Turion Z-80 dual core processor----4 gigs of RAM and Radeon 3200 onboard video----so I believed it had plenty of horsepower to run the 1080i TV (the laptop did NOT have DVI out or HDMI out. (The laptop rates at 4.4 on the Windows 7 user scale)

I also ran a network cable to a gigabit switch and disabled the wireless on the laptop....

Results----it was better than NOTHING----but I thought it was really dissappointing.

Loss of frames
some bad pixelation at times
jumpy
sometimes it would freeze

The sound came through beautifully---never any problem there----and the problems seemd to only appear when I ran it in full screen mode.

I ran the same game simultaneously off of ESPN 360 in my garage on my 22 inch monitor and my i7 machine in full screen mode and it was quite good the whole time.

What could be my issue and can you make some suggestions to make this a more watchable experience???

Is the processor not powerful enough?
Is it Internet bandwidth issues?-----seems unlikely as this same gigabit switch sends a internet to my Roku box that feeds to my HDTV for Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand----and looks gorgeous on it!
Is the Radeon HD 3200 Onboad Graphics not powerful enough to run the 1080i big screen??
Is the analog VGA hookup not nearly as capable??? Would digital HDMI be MUCH better??
Is it the Screen refresh rate of the HDTV? My specs say it is 6ms on the Hi Def TV

Don't care about gaming----just want to have a watchable TV experience off of ESPN 360

For $300 I can build a great little HTPC box with an AMD Callisto 550, DualCore, 4 gigs of RAM and HD 4200 Onboard Graphics with an additional 128 Sideport memory soldered in. The board would have HDMI out. For $150 more I could even go an i5 route with a dedicated fanless HD 4670 (but I suspect this is way overkill)

Help or suggestions appreciated.

John

[CrowdAds]

[ctal]

I ran the same game simultaneously off of ESPN 360 in my garage on my 22 inch monitor and my i7 machine in full screen mode and it was quite good the whole time.

Hi John,

Is it possible that is the problem? That you were doing two simultaneous downloads, and the server at the other end gave one a high priority and the other one a low priority?

Beyond that, my instinct would be that the very high refresh rate of the tv is suspect. Can it be lowered?

Best regards,
-- Al

[johnrr6]

Thanks Al....

No----I just ran the game in my garage for a few minutes to see if the ESPN360 feed was a problem----and only after I was frustrated with watching the game in my living room. so the Big screen TV was not good BEFORE I even tried the garage.....

And here's why I think my Internet bandwidth is fine----because while I was running BOTH----the garage was running beautifully while the TV was acting up----if it was a bandwidth thing-----it would have affected both.

It was almost as if the processor on the Laptop would not keep up....
jumpy
Pixelation
Frame rate loss
freezing

But from everything I've read the AMD Z-80 and HD 3200 onboard graphics are PLENTY enough to drive a big screen....The standard laptop computer screen looked gorgeous on the TV (although I could not get the setup to "mirror"----my laptop monitor screen had to be off for the HDTV screnn to come on) which leads me to think maybe the HD 3200 onbard graphics are NOT powerful enough----another possibility.

But you are also correct the TV has a tad high refresh rate although normal High Def sports events are BEAUTIFUL on it with NO motion blur at all.

I don't know of any way to lower the refresh rate-----I'll do some checking.

Do you think an HDMI digital out from a computer into the TV would be any different or "better" than the VGA setup??

I guess I need to borrow someones laptop with HDMI out-----and see if that improves the situation.

[ctal]

Hi John,

I don't have any particularly relevant experience to draw upon, but I would guess that HDMI will not do any better. The VGA output presumably is generated simply by taking the same data that is output via HDMI and putting it through some d/a converters (one for each of the three primary colors).

The refresh rate of 6ms (= 167 Hz) is the one thing in your posts that stands out in my mind as being likely to be particularly challenging, to both the graphics function and the cpu.

Regards,
-- Al

[Rick_EE]

Have you tried watching something else in full screen off the internet?

It really sounds like the video, though.

[johnrr6]

No haven't tried watching something else in full screen from a PC Feed.

But this particular TV is a special HP MediaSmart which has all the codecs and a Windows MediCenter Extender built in....

It plays all different types of videos fine from my HP Mediasmart Windows Home Server

and I also have a Roku box connected to one of the HDMI ports on the TV for Neflix Instant watching and Amazon video on demand straight off the internet (incidentally----the Roku was one of the BEST $100 investments I have ever made----and the streaming video is absolutely gorgeous with NO jumps or Lag and it's now only $80----incredible little piece of tech that actually WORKS!)

I've googled around a lot and it appears that:
HDMI is entirely better for this than analog VGA
And it "should" work better than it does for me---quality still a bit fuzzy at full screen but with none of the freezing and jumping.

LOL-----my son also called me from college and said he had hooked his PC to his 37 inch Samsung Superbite 120 mghz and the same game was quite good....and I KNOW his bandwith stinks compared to what I get here at my house! Now that PC is the one I built for him with a ATI 4870 card (darn powerful)----but maybe the 120 Mghtz is helping him here as that is supposed to help eliminate motion blur in highspeed video.

So my kid has a better setup than his old man------go figure!

I may join a Hig Def TV forum and ask them the same question.

[ctal]

HDMI is entirely better for this than analog VGA
And it "should" work better than it does for me---quality still a bit fuzzy at full screen but with none of the freezing and jumping.

Hi John,

Yes, HDMI will certainly provide much better picture quality than VGA, but in case my previous post wasn't clear what I meant was that I doubted that going to HDMI would (in itself) resolve the breakup/pixelization/freezing symptoms. I could certainly be wrong about that, though.

I found some specs on the tv, and they listed pixel response time as being 6ms. Are you sure the refresh rate is really also 6ms, or was that number just the pixel response time of the display (in which case it would have no relevance to the problem)?

Best,
-- Al

[johnrr6]

Pixel Rate 6ms
Refresh Rate is 60 Htz

My Bad----I'm learning as I go here......