So a while ago I asked about hooking HDMI to my TV but still playing sound through my receiver since it doesn't do HDMI and W29 did an awesome job of helping me out but I was wondering something.  

The person he asked said to do 720p instead of 1080i but I had thought 1080i I was still better.  My TV is 40" and I typically sit about 8-9' from the TV.  Sorry to ask more questions about this but I'm more or less clueless on all this stuff had just always assumed 1080i was supposed to be better (don't care if I'm wrong, just curious).

If you're talking about your PS3, it will automatically default to the game's preferred resolution based on your system settings as to what your TV supports.

I was mainly asking for upscale DVD's and BluRay.

In a broader sense, it really depends on the native resolution of the display. If you have a 1366x768 native resolution, it might be better to use 1080i as you may be able to partially utilize the higher resolution. However, the quality of your television's internal scaler also factors in here, as the display will have to deinterlace the image and display it at the native progressive resolution.

If you're talking specifically for movies, I would definitely stick with 1080i over 720p.

Hm, lets pretend I didn't understand a word of that.  :-p

I know I have this TV, the video going into the TV through an HDMI cable, and audio going through optical in the receiver.

Excuse me, but you can use 1080i on a 1366x768 resolution? Because 1080i is 1920x540 per frame... the 540 lines being interlaced.

Personally I prefer 720p.

If your using a 40" screen and your sitting that far away you honestly won't be able to tell the difference, but for arguments sake 720p would be a little bit smoother for sports or any fast action films due to the way it handles the video.

Your max Res seems to be 1366x768 which is 720p,  So there is no point in trying to force it to display 1080i as it can't acually do it. It will just scale it down to 720p.

As suspected, your TV appears to have a native resolution of 1366x768. In terms of watching movies, I would absolutely recommend you go with 1080i.

I don't know why, but playing on my 360 I have always used 720p. Granted my tv isn't top of the line, a 26'' Vizio, but it looks amazing. I have always been under the impression that progressive is better than interlaced. I also would like to hear everyone's thoughts on this though.