I found a site that streams college playoff games

[GW]

Yay, now we don't have to drive 25 miles (twice) to watch Alabama win the national championship again (we hope).

So, I've never done this streaming before but preliminary estimates seem to indicate this will cost about 150-170 MB per hour on settings of auto, default or 360 kbps . Does this sound about right? What's a good resolution to use for watching football ON 32" HDTV?  Does the internet stream also send the ESPN version of Dolby?

[Amanda]

Hi GW

My 2 pennies.. For a 32" and football I'd say you can go as low as 480p and not be sacrificing much on the side of quality. The data 'cost' sometimes varies on the site providing the content, same as the speed and risk of buffering. As an example, if I use an HT1100 on the Power plan (up to 10 down) to stream a live game from Twitch TV even in "mobile" quality, I get lots of buffering and sometimes it will auto-switch itself to audio-only. Watching the same stream being broadcast on YouTube Live works perfectly fine up to 1080p (though not a good idea). Data cost varies on the resolution you pick and the amount of 'junk' attached to the site you're watching from. One might even want to try using  something like VLC as the platform to watch the stream to avoid staying in a web browser by opening the source URL of the stream in the media player.

edit: Just remembered that the reason that Twitch TV is so horrible to stream on is that users who stream there can choose their own custom bit rates, meaning those who want to get out better, smoother quality will use higher bit rates which results in lag, buffering and less compression IIRC. Bit rate could also play a factor when streaming.


Thanks
Amanda

[GW]

Hi Amanda,

Thank you for your help. I tried the VLC but it couldn't connect to any URL I gave it. Not sure but I think this may be similar to what we used to call pirate tv.

Last night I was able to view the Texas A&M-K State game in progress at auto, default and 360  kbps bit rate settings without any buffering. All but the 360c kbps looked ok on my 24" monitor set to full screen.

I have 2 days to practice so hopefully I can get it to work well for us. It's such a pain to drive to town for  watching football games.

[BirdDog]

Like Amanda says a lot of things will factor in from my experience and you won't know for sure until you actually try it. Of course the trade off of quality versus data use ia a big one.

TVs are very different these days. Some have  60Hz refresh rate others have 120Hz rate, won't get into the new 4k ones. Some have a thing called Clear Motion to smooth out fast scenes which sports has a lot of. So, some TVs can handle lower definition better than others and still look good.

How are you getting the pic on the TV, through HDMI from computer browser or from browser on a Smart TV or app on the TV?

Much will also depend on the site you stream from. Their equipment, bandwidth capability, definition settings, compression used if any, etc. is going to make a difference.

Good definition on a 32" TV is very subjective and again depends on the TV itself. I'm fine with 360p but don't know how it would be with football. It is the definition all TV were back in the day of CRT screens. That use you quoted for an hour seems like it could be closer to 240p but don't know what is being done on the streaming server end.

Going to be one of those "don't know till you try it" kind of things IMO. One last thing in my experience is things tend to look better when using my laptop connected to the TV through HDMI cable versus using the browser or app on the TV. Plus usually have more control over the settings.

(Typing while you replied to Amanda)

[GW]

Thanks BirdDog. We don't have a smart tv but it's a good old Samsung. I figure I'll hook a laptop to it with HDMI cable and hopefully make the TV work as a monitor. I'll hook that up today and see how it looks.

It has something called LED Motion Plus to remove drag from movement. I'll play with that setting.
 
I let a game run last night for a full hour at the 360 kbps setting and used 173.44 MB of download bandwidth. I was occasionally coming back and doing other things with the computer at the same time.

[GW]

Haha, it works! It's running the Birmingham Bowl right now. FL vs. SC. Even at the 360 kbps setting it's a decent picture. Now I'm running it on 480 for an hour to get a reading on the bandwidth drain at that setting. Either way, it's sure a whole lot better than the picture you get on the radio 🙂

Funny thing though is there's no digital audio stream. My system jumps from Digital to ProLogic when I switch the input between OTA and this stream. I may listen to the games on the radio since this streaming audio is poor.

The LED Motion Plus function on the TV doesn't seem to do much of anything but make the picture dark.

I put a small BarbDog/Networx graph up in the corner out of the way.

That reminds me, what do you think about the Networx function that allows you to monitor traffic on the router? It seems to work and catch it all when I run it on my main computer that's hardwired to the ASUS router.

[BirdDog]

Glad to hear streaming is decent! Listening to audio on the radio will likely be out of sync with the picture though, different delays.

The little bit I used the Networx usage function I found it to be a bit off especially when compared to my router monitoring and HughesNet usage history. I may not of tweaked it enough though.