Today it's easier to watch most any type of video on a HDTV, but there are too many options -- by somewhat briefly going over most of them, I'm hoping that this might help sorting them out, making choices easier.
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Your hardware, & by that I mean your eyes & the parts of your brain that process what you see, can vary, as can your personal standards. I see things on a screen playing video that many do not. My youngest son sees other things that I [& a great many people] do not, e.g. he's sensitive to flicker. A great many people, perhaps even the majority, don't really care about picture quality or color accuracy that much, if at all. If you're one of them, you'll likely want to skip this section...
The basic LCD design used for the 1st flat panel screens was & still is limited in the number of colors that can be physically displayed. The companies that make these panels [& there are relatively few], have done an extreme amount of R & D over the years, but for the most part those original design limitations still persist. There are displays now that can display a wider range [or gamut] of colors, but they're much more expensive than the average pricing.
The exception is a smaller, maybe niche market, with several no-name companies, generally out of South Korea, selling wider gamut displays, primarily intended for PCs, at a greatly reduced price that's not *too* much more than the average. Their build quality, design, & reliability are usually iffy, though you now can buy them from sellers like Monoprice, Newegg, Amazon etc., which offers some protection should a unit have too many problems to suit you on delivery.
There are now several designs or versions of the original LCD displays, but each has its owns pros & cons, e.g. IPS panels can display more colors, but along with other issues they've had & have problems being slow to refresh &/or redraw the screen. Mostly flat panel displays attempt to get around their physical design limitations through the electronics that make them work, and this is the part that varies from one brand/model to the next more than the actual screen itself, which can be identical across brands & models. And the firmware [embedded program code] varies in those cases where the electronics are similar or identical. Like the different type of LCD screens, different electronics & firmware all have strengths & weaknesses -- there is no one perfect design, though you can get closer if you're willing to pay a high price premium.
HDTVs & PC monitors, while basically the same thing if you ignore the HDTV's tuner & such, tend to use different types of LCD screens & different electronics &/or firmware. If an HDTV's processing is slower, it's not a big deal unless you're trying to use it with a PC, e.g. expecting instant response when you move your mouse -- in that case you'd turn off the HDTV's processing, reducing picture quality. And because watching video means constantly changing pictures, you don't have to worry about stuff like solid, more readable text, or actually [coming close to] matching say the full range of colors standard on the web.
Now the point of talking about PC monitors & HDTVs 1st is that when you watch video your mileage will vary, and it will vary not just based on the quality of the screen... some methods or ways of playing video will work better with some HDTVs &/or PC monitors than others. An HDTV that does a lot of processing to give you a great picture will not if it's connected to a PC with that processing turned off. Sending a wider gamut [HDR] picture to a screen of any sort that cannot physically display that wider gamut [despite any claims on the box] is essentially useless. What looks wonderful on a PC monitor or cell phone may not on an HDTV, &/or the reverse.
When you're streaming video, artifacts minimized by a PC's or cell phone's software may not be minimized on an HDTV, unless the picture displayed on that HDTV comes from a PC or cell phone/tablet. BUT, you may have artifacts or quality issues of another sort, & what looks good from a PC, cell, or tablet etc. displayed on one HDTV may or may not on another. So if you buy something specifically to play video on your HDTV [or PC monitor], make sure that you can return it, just in case. And beware of hype, &/or what may seem like common knowledge stuff you'll read everywhere, but nowhere that it's been tested & proven.
Standard TV video [720 x 480 or 576] can look fine on a HDTV -- it usually looks better on smaller &/or cheaper HDTVs, because the people who buy those are more likely to watch that sort of video on them. Some HDTVs will show 720p at close to or at the same quality as other HDTVs show 1080p. Higher resolution means more total pixels, but like running Windows, that doesn't always mean any difference that you can see. [With Windows BTW, program windows look just the same at 720p, 1080p, & 4k -- the higher the rez, they just get smaller.]
And what that means is that lower resolution video, e.g. from a mobile device, can sometimes look fine. If you're going to access video over Wi-Fi or otherwise have limited bandwidth, lower resolution video can look better because it needs less compression to stay within your bandwidth limits. SO don't count on, or discount anything unless you've read multiple reports using identical hardware & video.
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There's digital OTA [Over The Air] broadcast, which is generally good quality, but unlike the old analog broadcast signal, digital broadcasts tend to be line of sight, meaning the signal can be easily blocked. And that means that what you can receive depends on where you are, & where your antenna's located [e.g. how high]. Antennas with built-in amplifiers may or may not help. The best tuners by far are the ones built into the TV.
Tuner cards & USB devices for PCs/laptops do work, but you'll normally get fewer signals [channels] with more drop-outs while viewing. The good news is that digital broadcasts are streaming video files, so to record one all you have to do is save that stream to some sort of storage. That means the hardware resources needed are really quite minimal. And there are several programs, many free, that let you do just that, on top of providing TV Guide & media library services etc., often with a TV & remote friendly GUI.
These PC tuners also work with the digital signal you get over cable, though here a signal amplifier may be needed. That doesn't mean that you'll necessarily get any more channels than using an antennae -- yes, you should get those OTA channels you can't pick up, but most of the other channels will have an embedded flag preventing you from viewing or recording/saving the stream.
With the popularity of external boxes & PC cards designed to record your HD gameplay, some folks **may** have come up with a potential recording work-a-round... Allegedly some of the HDMI splitters [one input & 2 or more outputs] strip HDCP from the signal. Research 1st because YMMV. Reviews also indicate these devices are somewhat short-lived. At any rate, since you're using HDMI that means you already have a tuner [like a cable or satellite box], & would need recording hardware with HDMI input like those for recording game play.
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The TV signals or streams you get via cable service are mostly encrypted, & they have different levels of encryption, spelling out stuff like whether a program or movie you recorded will eventually expire. TO view & record them you need a cable box, which may or may not include a DVR [Digital Video Recorder], or PC hardware that uses a cablecard. A cable box with a DVR *may* record programming only at SD [not HD] resolutions -- using a cable card setup you save the stream as-is. A cable box is usually a 2 way device while cable card hardware is not -- that means using a cablecard you can't access on demand or PPV. Long term the cablecard setup may be cheaper than paying monthly for a cable box with DVR.
The big Gotcha with using a cable card is that you can pretty much only use Windows Media Center that's available in win7 & 8, but needs a hack to get working in 10. A slightly smaller gotcha is that a recording may only be viewable on the device [PC] that recorded it -- this depends on the level of DRM set for that video stream. A 3rd gotcha is that once you get everything set up with the cable card hardware -- which isn't always easy, even in win7/8 -- WMC is old software that does not perform optimally by any stretch... you're Much better off using a PC with a graphics card vs. an integrated GPU [one that's part of the CPU], though you can often get it working without that separate graphics card.
While cable card hardware is/was designed for use with WMC in a PC running Windows, Silicon Dust is working on software that you run on a NAS. I've also found that one of my Sony Blu-ray players will connect to my HDHomerun Prime cablecard tuner, & play the different channels.
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Streaming online video is all the rage, in part because of the heavy marketing & hype, because you have several companies competing for your business. The long & short of video streaming is that while you can certainly have poor quality video at any bit rate & at any file size, you simply cannot have high quality video with a low bit rate and/or in a smaller file. The tech is getting there, & has made huge strides over the past decades, but we're just not there yet, nor are we likely to be in the near future.
That means you will not get high quality HD video without a high bandwidth internet connection, and using wireless networking is going to be challenging. Wired networking can even be challenging, e.g. you may have to isolate your video traffic using a separate network switch. That said, many [most?] don't object too much to the quality of streamed online HD video, because the cable & satellite alternatives use lower quality, lower bit rate streams themselves, both to save more money & make more money -- IOW it's what viewers are already used to.
Maybe the most confusing aspect of online video streaming is what device(s) to use. If you ignore the fan boys & girls [or at least take their claims with a grain of salt] there is nowhere near a clear winner. The cheapest devices are ARM CPU based, starting in the $30 range. Many let you play video files in addition to streaming -- newer processors let you play higher bit rate video, like what's found on Blu-Ray discs. But there are too many "Buts" to list... You may not be able to update the OS &/or the included apps, you may not be able to add any apps, you may not be able to browse the web [& play online video in a browser], you may be able to access only some video services, you may be restricted in the formats of video &/or audio the device will play, you may have problems with the device heating up, you may have start up, shut down, &/or sleep issues...
The list goes on, including things like the quality of the included apps. That's an issue you often get into when instead of a separate box or HDMI dongle, you want to use the streaming built into some Blu-ray players or so-called smart TVs. Besides typically being a bit slow in response time, it's also less likely that any of that Blu-ray or TV software will ever be updated.
There are some people who like to use their cell phones & tablets as a video source, casting, or more rarely using a HDMI cable, to send the small screen to the big one. Casting is wirelessly sending the display to a special receiver -- there's Apple's version, Miracast, & proprietary solutions like one from Samsung. Another technology *may* gain some popularity, but it's too soon to say... Microsoft came up with Continuum, which is basically using a Windows cell phone as the PC, using a special dock to connect to a larger monitor & running Windows desktop apps. Coming out at the end-of-life for Windows phones it might be DOA, except HP is investing large sums in a new product line [or lines] focusing on this tech for biz.
The main reason ARM-based devices are so popular for video streaming are the Android & iOS Apps. With those devices, for most any streaming audio &/or video service, there's a decent, sometimes great app. And for Windows, practically speaking, nothing at all. If you run Windows 10 there are some apps in the store, but those that do exist are usually inferior to the Android &/or iOS versions. SO with Windows you're often stuck playing streaming video in a web browser, & that brings with it all sorts of potential issues. For one thing it's hardly efficient running resource gobbling video inside a resource gobbling browser. Windows does however excel at playing local video files.
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When Windows XP was king, and Windows 7 was just starting to come out, the industry thought the future of TV viewing just might be the HTPC [Home Theater PC]. And there was quite the push, with several PC models coming out of the box with TV tuners etc. It never caught on, though there was [still is to a lesser extent] a large community of HTPC enthusiasts. XP allowed the widespread use of Kernel Drivers, which meant all sorts of audio devices & soundcards, most of which never reappeared for win7 where Kernel Drivers were mostly forbidden. It pretty much spelled the death of the add-on internal sound card for PCs, & spurred the adoption of external devices. And to get the movie & TV studios approval, Microsoft added heavy DRM to Windows 7 where XP had none. It took several years to get *some* of the worst kinks out, & by then it was simply too late.
Microsoft never invested in improving [or fixing] Windows Media Center, porting it to Windows 8 as an option, dropping it entirely from 10, where they hoped you'd just stream video from their store, & have no want or need for anything more. [I'm not sure how many people even know their store even sells video... 10 by default includes several store apps, it's hard to uninstall all of them, & since those apps are frequently updated separately from Windows Update, when MS quotes high numbers of users visiting their store, I'm not at all sure that means anything at all. Putting 10 on the Xbox improved their stats re: the number of people using 10, & pushing those Xbox owners/users to their store will undoubtedly give those numbers a big boost.]
Microsoft's neglect meant opportunity for software developers, and there are several media player & media center alternatives now available for Windows & Linux. With the exception of cable card devices, which only work in Windows Media Center thanks to its heavy DRM, those 3rd party alternatives work MUCH better overall. The downsides are that if you go for the best picture possible it means a bit of learning & tweaking, and life is more complicated with Windows compared to the more hands-off Android.
AMD & Intel have both done a lot of work on their integrated GPUs [graphics processors], so the cost of entry can be as low as around the $75 mark. While AMD & Intel were hoping to break into the mobile device market, so was Microsoft -- the result is that Windows 10 can be a lot friendlier to low end hardware than earlier versions. Countering that in the immediate future, Intel took a pause in its low end chip development, shifting resources so it can be a future leader with 5G cellular service. Until then ARM processors will take the lead in improving horsepower & features at the low end, at least until we see what AMD unveils late in 2016 & heading into 2017. Put another way, what you can get at the low end today is all you're going to get for a while. You can of course spend more money on a higher end PC.
At the low end you have tablets, HDMI dongles [sticks], & mini-PCs [also called NUCs, short for Next Unit Computing], though their product lines do stretch into higher powered PC territory when it comes to pricing. Small form factor [size] devices use CPUs [both ARM & x86] with low power requirements that give off less heat. A regular PC CPU doesn't share those requirements, and so they're more powerful --- with a PC you get sometimes Much more bang for your buck. When you can live with a larger box, you're better off going that route than buying all but the lowest priced mini-PCs etc. -- unless you're buying at the low end, the overall value just isn't there with the small form factor devices,
Besides the standard size PC cases many are used to, there are smaller sizes, some low profile designed for HTPCs, some in a more cube shape popular for gamers who take their PCs with them [e.g. to LAN parties], some designed by OEMs like HP & Lenovo to take less space in an office or home. You can find tips online on how to sort of integrate them into your home theater furniture, or buy furniture designed to hold a HTPC along with your HDTV, audio receiver etc. While the low end small form factor devices are silent, with no moving parts, PCs can be nearly silent, and semi-enclosed in something like a home theater center or cabinet, for many people they are totally silent.
The more powerful the PC & it's graphics hardware, the less problems you're likely to encounter streaming video with a web browser or using Windows Media Center, but their real strength is in playing media files you have already -- not something streamed. On that note a Windows device may [or may not] upscale video better than an HDTV itself --- which is better depends on the graphics hardware & drivers for the Windows device, and how well the HDTV handles upscaling. In either case the quality will most always be better than re-encoding the video at a larger frame size. [The only exception I've ever seen is if you have old, originally analog video that you'll spend a lot of time & effort filtering, & in that case, since you're taking a quality hit re-encoding anyway, often might as well enlarge it if you're going to.]
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There are lots of ways to get media files, some best left unmentioned here. The highest bit rate, & thus highest quality are normally released & distributed on Blu-ray discs. How does it compare to streaming? It's hard to say *exactly*, since video quality both online & on Blu-ray varies, but on our Vizio 4k TV a good quality Blu-ray looks better than the 4k video we've streamed from Amazon. The 4k video has more pixels, but it's compressed more to fit through the internet's pipes.
The easiest way to play video Blu-ray [or DVD] discs is with a stand-alone player. That's generally no big deal, though if the Blu-ray player has networking & apps it can take a bit of work to get it set up, while navigating & using those apps can often be a chore. The 2 most common problems with Blu-ray players nowadays that I'm aware of is they break, particularly re: the electronics that let you run those apps, and they have a tendency to play more challenging scenes poorly, stuttering &/or stalling, as if the video processing electronics are not powerful enough. Blu-ray players typically go for around 1/2 the price they originally sold for [though they're still not cheap], & I guess some of the corners they cut to get there shows.
The 2nd easiest way is to use a HTPC -- the Blu-ray drive will still probably break, but the HTPC itself shouldn't. Whether it's worth it or not is up to you -- a new Blu-ray drive will likely cost less than a stand-alone player [~$50 vs. maybe $75], but then you have the cost of software & few if any dedicated streaming apps like you have for Android. If you backup the Blu-ray [or DVD] discs you've bought, discs with Cinavia DRM should play on the HTPC however -- on a Blu-ray player they won't.
TO go beyond those 2 options you have to copy the Blu-ray [or DVD] video to a hard disk, and often work with those files further to get a single file the average Android player can deal with. You might also go this route to get the files on a hard drive where they'll be stored, &/or if you want to use player that doesn't [or doesn't always] navigate Blu-ray or DVD discs correctly. Some Windows players will let you use stuff like MadVR or LAVFilters, which can improve, or in some cases allow video playback.
A DVD will have a VIDEO_TS folder, usually with 3 or 4 consecutive ~2GB VOB files making up the movie. DVD Shrink will copy the movie to another folder using a single VOB file, which many players can handle. If your preferred player will not, there are Windows apps to strip the mpg2 video with the usually AC3 audio out of the VOB file(s). There are also apps to OCR the subtitles, turning them into a text file with the .srt extension -- named the same as the video file, stored in the same folder, many players will display those subs if you wish. Or you can convert the video to AVC, since most Android players have chips for hardware accelerated AVC playback. Mileage will vary depending on the quality of the original DVD, which can nowadays be marginal, just to discourage this sort of thing.
With Blu-ray you may wish to convert the movie to a file with a lower bit rate, since not all ARM processors can handle the video as-is, &/or if you want to access the video file over Wi-Fi, which may not be able to handle the bit rate either. But if that's not a problem for you, there's no reason to change the actual video, so you won't lose Any quality. The simplest, but not the only way may be to use MakeMKV, which will put the movie audio, video, & subtitles in a single mkv file.
A Blu-ray disc will have BDMV & CERTIFICATE folders. With many software players you need to select the BDMV folder to play. Inside the BDMV folder there will be a PLAYLIST & a STREAM folder, along with a couple .bdmv files. Inside the STREAM folder will be one or more .m2ts files. *IF* the movie is contained in a single .m2ts file, software players, including some for Android, will often play it as-is. Unfortunately the movie may be split among a few or a dozen files, with the file order to play the movie listed in a play list in the PLAYLIST folder. Unfortunately there you may find over a hundred play lists to choose from.
Software that can copy just the main movie to a folder on your hard drive makes it easier by giving you one play list & only those .m2ts files that are used for the movie [otherwise there may be dozens, many (or most) of them dummies]. That software [e.g. DVDFab] should also let you include only those language & subtitle choices you want. If you have more than one .m2ts file, tsMuxeR can give you separate files, one with the video, one for each audio & sub track. It can also give you the core 5.1 audio track when the disc only has an HD track -- that's smaller & easier to work with if you want to convert it to a smaller file(s) in another format like AC3 or AAC etc. tsMuxeR will also re-combine the files for you, or you can use an alternative app to put the content into a mp4 or mkv container, whichever your device & player prefers. Subtitles can be OCRed the same as with DVDs.
The job of the people who designed the Blu-ray disc is to often hide the correct play list so no one can find it. The job of the people who write software like DVDFab is to always find the correct play list --- sometimes they fail. This can get complicated, e.g. Java can be used to write the correct play list only temporarily. And when DRM cuts in, it's usually at least 20 minutes into the movie, though it can be further in than that. When something like DVDFab gets it wrong, you can wait for a fix, or take to Google to see what playlist others have found & used. Or try the .m2ts files listed in the play lists opened in Notepad, & see if they work in that order. There was a way to use Process Monitor, but the temporary play list was apparently designed to defeat that. Note that the correct playlist can vary not just by region, but by the retailer who sold the disk, & in what part of the country.
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You can sometimes save online streamed video, and there are several specialized tools that *may* work depending on the online source of the video. If the video has DRM, free software tools can be difficult to use, while payware's usually not so hard, but neither is guaranteed to always work, since DRM can be updated at any time. You might be able to record online video with a device intended to record your gameplay. And you can screen capture video while it's playing, though it can require powerful hardware if you're capturing 1080 playing in a web browser. Some services allow you to download online video [something allegedly planned for Netflix], & besides playing that video there may be other ways to access it -- I would bet on a lot of work being done to figure out how to do just that if/when Netflix allows downloads in the future.