#35
Post
by barnabas1969 » Mon May 27, 2013 9:28 pm
Hmmmm... after further investigation, I found that I don't get 5.1 audio in the browser either (nor 1080p video). Somehow, I thought that I would. My memory isn't what it used to be. So... using the browser would only give me the ability to turn subtitles on/off, but then only with a mouse. The nifty little program I linked in post #20 gives you quick navigation to different areas in Netflix (including the DVD Queue, which no longer works in the Media Center plugin), but it still doesn't give you access to easily turn CC on/off via a keyboard (and therefore the remote via an EventGhost macro).
I honestly don't care about 1080p from Netflix. I have a 64-inch, high-end TV mounted on my wall approx. 12 feet (3.66m) from my eyes when I'm sitting on the couch. The TV is set for 1:1 pixel mapping (no over-scan, so the TV's scaler is not involved when displaying a 1080p image because the TV's native resolution is 1920x1080). As a side note, I also have Media Center setup so that the display is a "Television" so that there is no over-scan caused by Media Center. I have actually done an experiment using two images, displayed full-screen in MS Paint. One was 1920x1080 and the other was 1280x720. Both had alternating white/black vertical lines. The lines were exactly one pixel wide in both images. I wore my progressive prescription glasses, which correct my vision to 20/20 at any distance ranging from 6 inches to infinity (with a special "continuum" curve that allows me to see a wider field of view in-focus at mid-to-far distances).
When I displayed the 1920x1080 image (with the video adapter and TV set to 1080p), I had to sit with my eyes closer than 6 feet from the screen in order to see the individual white/black lines. Any farther, and the image looked gray. When I displayed the 1280x720 image (with the video adapter and TV set to 720p, invoking the TV's internal scaler), I had to sit closer than 9 feet to see the individual black/white lines.
The reason the white/black lines blurred to gray has to do with human visual acuity. We humans actually cannot see a single dot or line that occupies less than a certain "arc minute" (look up "human visual acuity") in our field of view. Look it up. Anything smaller than that gets averaged together. This is why a television, with a mix of red, blue, and green dots, appears as an image with 16 million+ colors to us. If we could see the individual colored dots (like when you put your face right up to the TV screen), we would see the individual colored dots instead of the colors and shapes that we are supposed to see.
So... if you have a 64" screen, and you sit closer than 6 feet (1.83m) from your eyes to the screen... then you need 1080p. But, if you sit more than 9 feet (2.75m), 720p is fine for you... with the same size screen. If you have a 32" screen, cut those distances in half. If you have a 128" screen, double them. Anything in between, it's proportional.
For example, I used to have a 1024x768 projector (which had a really good scaler built-in). My screen was 120" (4:3) or 110" (16:9). My viewing position was 16 feet from the screen. HD looked great! When viewing wide-screen content, I only extended the screen far enough to display a 16:9 image, so that the black mask surrounded 3 sides of the image and the top of the image was projected only an inch or two from the ceiling. This was 2003, when most TV was in 4:3. When watching a 16:9 program, it used all 1024 pixels for the width, and cut off the bottom pixels (because my projector had a pixel-shift function), so the resulting 16:9 image occupied 576 pixels in height... so the 16:9 image was 1024x576. But... at 16 feet viewing distance, it looked as good as a 1920x1080 image on a 64" screen at 6 feet.
The point here is that the human eye can't tell the difference between a 1024x576 image on a 110" screen at 16 feet from a 1920x1080 screen at 6 feet (assuming that the scaler does a good job on the 1024x576 image).
So... do you REALLY need 1080p? Probably not, unless you sit VERY close to the screen (or you have a VERY large screen).
I think that 720p in Netflix should make most people happy. But I'd still like 5.1 audio and subtitles. I guess I'm better off using the built-in features of my "smart" TV. It gives me 5.1 audio, 1080p, and control of subtitles. But, in my opinion, the interface in Media Center is much better than the interface in my TV.
EDIT: I'll admit that I looked at projectors that could do true 1080p back in 2003 when I built that projection system... but they cost ten times as much as I spent, and the PQ difference could only be seen at close distances. My system used a projector that cost about $1600 and a tab-tensioned, motorized screen that cost about $1700. It made a fantastic movie night!
