After Thursday’s debacle with streaming from ESPN3, last night was a bit of redemption. I watched the entire Michigan/ Notre Dame game streaming it through my 1015PN onto our 41″ Sony Bravia.
On the downside, I had trouble getting good video quality. The Nvidia ION graphics processor defaulted to 1080P resolution. The video was very choppy, and it often seemed like it “degraded” to the point where I was just getting stills every 10-15 seconds or so. When I was getting motion, the picture was very blurry. Also, using the Opera browser, the full-screen mode did not work at all. It would give a bigger picture, but it was not full-screen. Rather, it was “window” centered in the screen with a picture that wasn’t centered properly.
I was tempted to lay these issues at my ISP’s door, but I decided to try fiddling with the resolution (per the Wife’s suggestion) to see if that would improve the picture. I also tried a different browser. The results were dramatic.
First, I switched to Google’s Chrome browser. That fixed the full-screen problem.
In conjunction with that, I modified my xorg.conf to limit the resolution the ION was outputting through the HDMI to 720p. I managed that with the following two lines added to the Screen section:
Options "TVStandard" "HD720p"
Options "MetaModes" "1280x720"
The TV indicated it was still receiving 1080p over the HDMI connection, but when I relaunched X and reconnected to the game using Chrome, the picture quality was outstanding. Also, I noticed that my statusbar from the window manager was much larger, indicating that I was getting a different resolution. As for the video, it was basically crystal clear with excellent motion. There was a just a little choppiness in the motion, and the occasional blurry patch for certain colors (yellow in particular, no idea why). But overall, the game was completely watchable.
Given those successes, I’ll definitely be doing the streaming thing again. I was quite pleased that the 1015PN proved itself capable, with a little tweaking. The only other thing I need to figure out is how to stop it from suspending. Having to touch the trackpad every few minutes was a nuisance.