Hi there, I am currently in the process of purchasing a new tv and am pretty set on this 60” lg 3D set model "60PZ550." The main reason I’m interested in this TV (other than the great price) is its wifi capability. My main question is: What is the simplest, smoothest and most effective way for me to watch hd movies stored in my computer on my tv. Things to keep in mind about the context of my situation: - My desktop computer and modem is located upstairs and the TV will be setup downstairs - Where I live p2p and torrents are legal, and the majority of movie files that I will be playing will be mkv mp4 and iso. Essentially I’m looking for the best way to play a diverse range of file formats from my computer on to my tv smoothly. My concerns: When I tried setting up my windows media center with the xbox360-extender through the xbox wireless n adapter last year, movies would start to stutter or pause temporarily to cache and then continue. I believe playback was choppy due to the wifi and I have heard cautionary tales about playing movies over a wifi connection. I am concerned that this will happen again, and that playback will not be smooth streaming from my pc upstairs to the plasma downstairs. Is it necessary for me to buy additional hardware components? I feel like if this 2011 tv has wifi built in then theoretically there should be no need for me to buy a blue-ray player or what not, because with the tv's wifi capability it could recognize my computer from upstairs and I could just play movies through vlc. Is this not correct? Thanks so much I truly appreciate any responses
Yeah that is pretty much it. I have a few questions. What kind of wireless does the TV have is it N? is it G? how much speed does it have? What kind of wireless router do you have(same as last questions)? Theoretically you should be able to play 1080 across a wireless connection but that all depends on the speed of your wireless connection. Your signal range will also determine this speed as well as anything that may conflict with your signal will effect the speed of your connection. Now there are ways to boost your signal like changing the antennas on your router but I'm not well versed in the best solutions so the best I could say is maybe look around and do some research on google. My other concern would be do you know that this T.V. will play the formats that you want to run these movies on? Mkv has been the standard for blu-ray and hd quality and it is still not compatible with the 360 but I found Ps3 media server(a program that is compatible with 360)can do a great stream if your computer has the processing power to handle it. If your not sure of these things I don't recommend you risk buying that type of TV. The next best thing to a wired connection is just having a device that you can watch through an internal or external usb hdd. If you can purchase a computer like an apple mini that comes with an hdmi(vga looked great on my LCD), you can load your movies on the hdd and there is a great program called XBMC (available at http://www.xbmc.org/) that has a great front end and is compatible with most formats like vlc. It can also stream the content its what I used for my wireless streaming and it didn't a decent job with my iso's and avi's with a hicup every once in while. I also ran 720p mkv file like I mentioned earlier and the only hang ups came when there was to much going on screen(particularly when it was a rain fall scene or one with a crazy amount of effects going on at once).
Hi sorry for re-posting all of that. I didn't mean to.. must have hit the wrong button and its impossible to delete any post you make on here. Aside from that: Thank you for your very informative and well written post. I agree with all of your points however I think I'm going to pick up a western digital hd media player as it is a very easy/cheap and effective option for flawlessly playing almost anytype of hd file format, and I wouldn't have to worry about a sketchy wifi connection because it would be playing the files off a thumb drive and the player would be directly connected to my tv via hdmi. value/cost wise don't you agree that this would be the best option as it would do everything I want it to do without risking a choppy video over a network. Having that xbmc sounds like a cool gadget that would work well, but that means I have to buy an htpc -which is far more expensive than just buying a portable hd media player that does the same thing, with only difference being sticking a usb drive in a port(which is super quick and easy) instead of things being streamed over a network.
