Right, so I end up buying a 65” display. There were rationales’
behind this, fist that our main living room TV is now ancient. It’s a 720p
Panasonic, still going strong, but now obsolete. My wife complained not so much
about the size, but more so about the image quality, as generated by the old Sky+ box
connected to it.
I saw Amazon selling the Hisense 65” UHD for £900, so I
though kill three birds with one stone, get UHD, upgrade downstairs TV and the
as yet unmentioned 3rd bird, the Samsung buzzing problem will be
part solved, the one they promised to fix February last year (2014), yes I know
that experience deserves a blog entry of its own.
So it arrived, box slightly beaten up, so we videoed it’s
unboxing, however all was fine physically.
There are some reviews of this around, however performance
wise, the most significant issues is that normal def, often referred to as 576p,
or that which is broadcast by my Sky HD and BT Youview box as standard
non-hidef, looks awful. This is quite apparent when comparing it to the 59”
Samsung Plasma.
So now I have a ‘technology that just doesn’t work’ issue.
The Samsung not only buzzed, which was quite noticeable during quiet scenes, charging
input on it was a nightmare, the way it would start trying to tune channels
when there’s no aerial connected, how slow it would be moving between inputs,
the timeouts etc. It made turning the TV on a fist fight with the TV, it amazes
me that so many people put up with this. From a UI perspective the Hisense
doesn’t offer much, but it is just such a relief that changing inputs is so
much better. Anyway that aside, my problem is, what is the best way to drive
it? The BT (Humax) Freeview box, i.e. status quo is out of the question, the
non Hi-def output is just far too poor to live with, and HD content thin on the
ground.
Next up using my Zotac ID-41 media player, and then buy a
DVT USB device for live TV. The Zotac is a 1080p device, and I noticed that
recodings, that looked bad on the Humax, looked a lot better when up-scaled by
Kodi on the Zotac. Worth mentioning that use of VLC is not an option the GPU is
an Nvidia Ion which does a good job of rendering h264 mkv’s at 1080p, but the
processor is an Intel Atom that struggles with h264 playback.
But then I tried my PC, which has a rather OTT graphics card
that I bought cheaply, an MSI R9 290, that has Ultra HD output, i.e. 4020 by
2160. Now use this and the quality is excellent, with Kodi upscaling so well
that even 1080p mkv’s look better than they do on the Zotac in its native
1080p. Even though I have an AMD FX-8350 Eight Core CPU running at 4.3 GHz, when
using VLC it struggles to play 1080p files in Ultra HD. Problem is that if I use
Kodi with dual display, I can’t use my PC at the same time, because if I take
the context away from Kodi by using any other application, it turns off its
output to the second display, i.e. the Hisense 65”. Though I can run its output
‘in a window’, that degrades its performance somewhat, but I have yet to try that
one. The latter is because I am not keen on using my heavy weight PC as a media
player in the first place, though it tends to be on when we’re watching telly
anyway.
So here’s my dilemma, what to do? Buy an Android based ultra
HD media player that uses Kodi for about £60, e.g. M8’s etc? (.. and if so
which one, there are so many!) Then stick a USB DVT box on it?
Should I get the spare stuff I have and put a little PC
together, with a display card that can manage quad HD?
Oh as for the Hisens’s built in Smart apps etc. nearly all
useless, German, and slow (on YouTube for example), not to mention that it’s
managed to crash a few times. A relative bought a new Samsung 50" display, has near identical Smart apps (is this some Android variant?), just as slow and useless, i.e. doesn't play a lot of mkv's and flv's etc.
