I just don't get it.

I'm watching Star Wars: Episode IV and for some reason the picture looks clear and crisp on my PC, and the colors are beautiful. However, on my TV, the picutre looks a little grainy and the colors look faded. I got a Sony Wega HDTV, and I have gone all through the setup to get an optimum picture.

Could it be my graphics card on my PC? I have a Radeon 9600 XT, and am dipslaying it on a KDS USA 17" Xtreme Flat Screen monitor (not the best monitor, but great for the money). Can a graphics card make THAT much difference? I am using Nero 6 to play the DVD. Any thoughts?

[lol @ HAT!!!]

I'm only guessing, but I bet the difference is in your monitor, not the graphics card.

I knew he was watching a Star Wars movie. I was like, "hmm, I wonder what movie he is going to mention by the looks of the title thread. Would it be a Star Wars movie?" Bingo.

What is your monitor?

How is your DVD player connected to the TV?

Quality Relationship Guide:
DVI/HDMI > VGA > Component > S-Video > Composite > Coaxial.

Coaxial and composite encode both chroma and luma on the same pin, which causes severe loss of color and image definition. ANCIENT TV - DOES NOT SUPPORT HD
S-Video encodes chroma and luma on separate pins, so you get good image sharpness but poor color definition. NORMAL TV - DOES NOT SUPPORT HD
Component encodes the video in a color vector space with a separate chroma value. I'm not sure of the mathematics behind it entirely, but it has excellent color definition. EDTV AND HDTV
VGA is similar to component, except it encodes raw RGB color values rather than a color vector. It also usually includes a separate syncronization signal, so it can handle many different resolutions. COMPUTER MONITOR
DVI/HDMI is a digital video carrier. It has the highest quality and maps directly to display pixel values, while the others are analog formats and depend upon synchronization signals. COMPUTER MONITOR AND HDTV

SCART is a carrier for all of the analog formats commonly used in Europe.

Given the problems you're describing, your DVD player is likely connected to your TV by composite. You'll need to purchase a component video cable (RCA cables won't work because they have a higher impedence) and make sure your DVD player supports component output and progressive scan modes.

Through a power conduit that hooks up the S Video/Audio.

I Seriously DOUBT my monitor is better than a Sony HDTV. Come on.

lol

TVs have crappy resolution.

Monitors have a better resolution


thats my only explanation

How? Is HDTV just hype compared to PC monitors?

...power... conduit....?

What the Christ are you on about?

There's your problem anyway: You're connecting your HDTV with a cable designed for ordinary TVs. It's not going to look better than a normal TV.

I'm guessing that it has something to do with a higher resolution on a small monitor looking clearer than that same resolution on a large television monitor. 800x600 isn't that bad on a 15 inch monitor, but it looks like *** on a 19 inch. But then again, I don't know diddly about monitors.

You've never seen one?

That's it!

Although to get a signal I have to be going 88 mph ...

Actually though it's pretty much something like this:

http://www.monstercable.com/power/

Just wire it to your right hand and watch Return of the Jedi.

Haha, "power conduit". You must have just watched a Star Wars movie or something.

Remember, R2 got electrocuted when he mixed them up.

Oh okay. Next time you should try stapling $20 bills directly onto the back of your TV, it works just as well and doesn't cost shipping.

If you are using an HDTV then you simply don't have things adjusted and/or setup properly. My personal opinion is that the typical computer setup rarely looks as good as a properly configured home video setup. Of course higher quality computer equipment will look better than crappy or mal-adjusted video equipment. Then there's the viewing distance to your setups. A comparitively small computer monitor (19" and below) at a certain distance is going to look sharper than most HDTV monitors when you view them too close.

Well, the thing is--computer monitors are 99% of the time going to look better. No matter what. Unless you can afford quite an expensive TV, or use a Flexor-esque resolution.

BUT, there are TVs out there that look just as good as computer monitors (as far as sharpness/color quality goes) and are much bigger. 25+ inches.

For your own good, especially when dealing with HDTVs, just watch this episode of DL.TV. Robert Heron may have a weak camera presence, but he is ISF certified and knows what he is talking about.

http://digitallifetv.com/blogs/digitallifetv/archive/2005/11/24/2384.aspx

Yoshi's right on that note. Monitors tend to have much, much higher resolution, even than HD TVs.

And, wait, you actually paid for that retarded Monster power filter? Please tell me you bought gold plated optical cables for your audio connections, too!

And you've got to consider that HDTV can't magically make a low resolution DVD high resolution. Depending on how your player displays the video on the computer your monitor gets adjusted to the right resolution. With HDTV you have to artifically scale the video, so that it would actually even look better on a TV with lower resolution.

Sometimes I notice that things that look bad on TV look good on PC, but most of the time it's vice versa.

1280x1024 on a 17" LCD will probably look at least as good, if not sharper than 1920x1080 (or whatever your TV displays) on a 32".

My tv looks better than my monitor any day. Might be the size and aweness of it.

MyTV

I want a new TV...lol

<- needs a job

<- Needs a life outside of job.

Wrong.

It's been said but... "That's no TV! It's a space station!"

And the point in having a TV that size 6ft away from you is?

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Wrong.[/QUOTE]

That would be why I said /probably/. :p

DVDs are EDTV, usually. Some DVD transfers are interlaced but good DVD players and good HDTVs will have a deinterlacer.

Like I said above: to get what little good there is out of a DVD, you need a component video cable and a DVD player that supports progressive scan. This will effectively double the vertical resolution of your display. Listen to me, goddamn it.

DVDs have a very very very poor color quality, however, and many transfers are poorly done. A DVD on a high-quality display device will actually look worse because you can notice all of the problems. I somehow doubt that's your problem though: try getting rid of the gold-plated nitrogen-injected-casing s-video cable and replace it with a component video cable. Few HDTVs bother with the hardware required to get a good pulldown off of S-Video, because if you have a HDTV you shouldn't be using it.

You're supposed to sit much closer to an HDTV than a conventional CRT due to the higher resolution. Ideally you should be able to make out a single pixel from your normal sitting position.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Well, the thing is--computer monitors are 99% of the time going to look better. No matter what. Unless you can afford quite an expensive TV, or use a Flexor-esque resolution.

BUT, there are TVs out there that look just as good as computer monitors (as far as sharpness/color quality goes) and are much bigger. 25+ inches.[/QUOTE]

That all looks good in writing but the fact is that the monitor/TV is just the last step in the viewing process. The more important aspect is the type and quality of the signal being sent to the monitor. The TV tuner card in my computer generally displays an image that looks worse than a normal broadcast. And my personal experience was that DVDs would look better on my standard 27" TV through a composite connection than on my 19" CRT.

A 480i image is not going to look good just because it's running at 1920x whatever. Now of course there are hardware capabilities built into many video cards, TVs, DVD players, etc that intelligently upscale the signal which might produce that result.

My current home entertainment setup includes an older ProLogic receiver, mediocre DVD/VCR combo, and a 51" Panasonic rear projection LCD. The television was abit pricier than others it's size due to it's quality. I've had no complaints of image quality whether the signal has been standard tuner, composite, component, or VGA from my laptop. With a larger screen you must sit further back for pixelation not to be an issue. I would say my seating position is roughly 7-8 feet from the unit. That might sound close but you'd have to see the arangment.

Bah, I'm just babbling because we're on a topic I enjoy.

I recently did some research on this. Progressive scan, deinterlacing, etc are essentially the same thing. I found out than on most high quality displays the benefit of switching to a progressive scan DVD play (which sends each frame as one signal instead of the standard method of only displaying a portion of each frame at an instant) is usually not noticeable. Apparantly most HDTVs, you have to look at the specs of each, are going to have "deinterlacing" built in which basically takes each seperate piece of each frame contained in the signal and puts them together before displaying it. The biggest benefit I have read is that even cheap progressive scan DVD players generally do a better job of assembling the information than most high end sets but, like I said, the difference is said not to be obvious.

Personally, I'm not sure why you seem a little irritated by the low quality of DVD. DVD is far higher quality than any media the average consumer had access to before, incluing laser disc. The biggest irritation is that producers don't always care to ensure the best transfer or that they show defects in the original recording. For example, some episodes in season one of Battlestar Galactica have quite abit of grain. Now that show did have a gimmicky, documentary style of filming so the grain could simply be intended or a result of low light and cheaper equipment when it was filmed.

The upcoming format will really be the one to get into. We'll have to see who wins that war!

No they aren't. It depends on the DVD transfer and the device.

The YCbCr DVD colorspace evaluates to 12-bit RGB color weighted toward the brighter end of the spectrum, so you lose a lot of definition at low brightnesses. Additionally, MPEG2 compresses video in blocks of 8x8 pixels so blocking artifiacts are extremely commonplace. Modern DVD players and TVs use heavy motion compensation hardware and software to eliminate many of the artifacts but it's still a flaw in the underlying format. It's also huge, and there's no excuse for this amount of artifacting on 10 mbit/s video.
Overlays are also stored as bitmap images and limited to 4 colors, making subtitles and menu cursors look awful no matter what DVD player you're using.

Will the players for the new format be able to play DVDs? Cause, you know, having to replace old VHS tapes really SUCKED.

I dunno about inherently, I'm pretty sure HD-DVD will, but Bluray I'm not 100% about. It'd be easy to make a combo device though.

Bluray will win because people trust Sony for home entertainment, not Microsoft. Well, that and it's able to store more, but at that size (at the moment) it doesn't really matter TOO much. It'll be nice to use Bluray for backup though

RE: Jon C

I'll agree with the limitations, and I did recently notice just how bad subtitle look, or at least on a larger screen. I didn't notice before as my screen was either smaller or further away. Still, as I said, DVD is vastly superior to previous formats and it's really only showing its age because many of us now own displays that make the limitations more obvious. If you think a DVD looks bad you could stick with VHS!

And my explanation of deinterlacing and progressive scan essentially being the same was meant for to be simple. While the process is not the same the end result on a high end display is that the average person will see no benefit by switching to a progressive scan player and the videophile will only, at best, see little improvement. Of course, you get what you pay for and I'm sure that a $1000 progressive scan player will display a better picture than a $30 progressive scan player with the bang for the buck probably in the $2-300 range. A more detailed explanation of things of a progressive scan nature can be found on the internet. Sorry, I had a good link but seemed to have misplaced it. The site I looked at before actually had some sort of product, probably a DVD, that displayed a pattern on your TV which would show how much of the image you were losing. It had very understandable explanations of interlaced, deinterlacing, 3:2 pulldown, etc. And it noted that a highend display might throungh it's "re-interlacing" circuitry produce an image quite comparable to progressive scan players.

We're not really debating since I think we agree on the obvious limitations of DVD however it's superior to all previous formats and it's replacement is on the way. That's the reason I am waiting to purchase a superior player to the one I have to include computer equipment. No sense in spending top dollar for premium equipment right now when they'll be "last-gen" within a year or so.

Thank you. I obviously have no idea what interlacing or progressive scan are and I clearly think VHS is a better format than DVD or H.264. I really appreciate how you dumbed-down the concept so my feeble mind could grasp the idea. Thanks!

Edit: "High-end displays" don't have "re-interlacing" hardware because "high-end displays" are almost always "flat panels". CRTs will step up a 480P signal to 720I or 1080I. It's not going to drop 480P back down to 480I.

I would imagine both formats will or rather their players. Really it didn't suck too bad to replace VHS tapes that meant much because the deteriorate so bad as to make them extremely annoying to watch. I read many years ago that you should at least run a tape all the way through, forward and back, once a year. I've never done that. Thing that sucks are versions of Star Wars I have destined to deteriorate while the originals stay safely locked up in Lucas' vault. I have a great widescreen VHS version of both the unmolested and first version of the special editions.

But even if you can't play the format on the new player you still have your old player. And unless films are optimized for the format then you won't necessarily see an improvement. You know that the new format is simply going to get some direct copies from the old one and none of the benefits realized. An older movie shot on regular film might now show a big improvement, depending on the transfer, but a modern film that was filmed all digital will probably show a large improvement.

In short, the average consumer may see little need to upgrade especially if they still use a traditional TV. Even if I were in that situation I would want to upgrade to "future proof" my collection. Essentially that's what I did with DVD. A couple years before I finally bought a DVD player I virtually stopped buying VHS especially when you look at the fact that it's a disposable format. Even when your DVDs are old they should play like new.