Looking for a new 55" LCD, how useful is wifi?

[tracerit]

I watch a lot of movies from my laptop on my current 40" LCD by connecting it as a monitor. I'm going to give this one to my dad and will get myself a 55". I noticed some have wifi capabilities. From what little I've read, the wifi seems to just support the usual facebook, youtube, widgets, etc included from the TV maker. Will I be able to stream my desktop to the TV? If not, I think i'll just continue to connect with HDMI and watch that way.

 

[Bman123]

I can steam from my desktop to my vizio TV over the WiFi. It works pretty good too. My vizio is a 2011 model so the newer TVs should handle that easily. I think it's called dlna on the TV specs

 

[Matt1970]

One other thing is Netflix did away with a lot of the PC based HD content so you need the apps in TV's and BluRay players to view a lot of the HD content.

 

[tracerit]

does my laptop need any special features to stream out? or does the TV connect to the laptop through some sort of file manager?

 

[purbeast0]

i've streamed stuff DLNA to my tv from my pc, wired, and it does not compare in quality if you just use HDMI out.

i've tried streaming both directly to my tv, and to my ps3 hooked to my tv. the tv software was complete crap. this is on a panasonic st50. i tried it once and that was enough. constant dropouts, freezes, etc. the ps3 playback was a million times better.

that said, the ps3 playback still isn't as good as just hooking up a laptop directly. you have to have it transcode on the fly, which can work just fine. however if you want to rewind or skip forward, good luck with that. it will either be really slow, or flat out lockup sometimes.

and remember, this is over wired. personally i wouldn't bother with streaming if you have the option to hook up an hdmi to it from the laptop. my tv is wall mounted and has a side hdmi slot on it, so i've used that to hook my laptop up to my tv.

just my experience and 2 cents.

 

[Skott]

I'm curious about this subject as well. You would think the TV's wifi would be just as good as a laptop or pc. From what I hear they are pretty much the same hardware they put into PCs. Now the software may be different and maybe this is where the PC is better?

 

[TheStu]

One other thing is Netflix did away with a lot of the PC based HD content so you need the apps in TV's and BluRay players to view a lot of the HD content.

What?

 

[Born2bwire]

What?

Haven't noticed that myself, but I am miffed that the SuperHD is only offered on PC via Windows 8. I've got a Roku 3 coming in and with the removal of restrictions on SuperHD, I'm interested in seeing what the difference is.