I hope someone can explain this to me. I just bought a new Samsung 40 inch 120hz flat screen TV.It looks great! I have been using a standard cheapo DVD player from Walmart, a Magnavox with no upconverting or HDMI cable capable or anything, to play back my DVD's on my old TV and they continued to look good even on the new flat screen.
Many of the DVD's that I play are non-HDAVI videos from the internet that have been burned using good software (TMPGEnc) onto TDK +R discs. I am content with the Magnavox, but being the tweaker that I am I knew I would a least want to try a more modern DVD player with upconvert capability and an HDMI cable option and I found a reasonable Samsung that I thought would do the trick.
Well to my surprise, the DVD's did not look near as good in the Samsung compared to the Magnavox and that was even with the HDMI cable hooked up. I did try real quick to adjust the HD settings in the Samsung but that did not appear to change anything,(although I may not have done it right) nor did just using the phono plugs instead of the HDMI cable help.
I should mention that I did not try any pre-recorded DVD's during my little "test" and not all of the burned discs looked bad, but a lot of them did.
So I'm stumped as to why this is happening. My first thought was that maybe just certain player brands play back burned DVD's better than others, so I took the Samsung back and will look into this issue more before trying a different brand.
Could it also be that the Magnavox scans at 480p and that when a burned disc is played back in the newer machine it's too much for the video to handle? By the way when I say the video looks bad, it's clear but the colors seem to move around and everything looks a little too expanded or sometimes out of focus.
I'm assuming that this might be a case where these burned discs that I have may only ever be able to be played back on an older machine, and I guess I'm fine with that, but I just trying to get some answers.
you fed the standard def signal into the hdmi port.. no wonder it looked crap.. sorry.. to compare you should have used the composite yellow/red/white plugs as usual.
No it's very good video, at least from being from the internet. I had a tech friend of mine just recently explain my situation to me. While everything he says makes sense, I still want to keep shopping around for a machine that just might be able to make these videos show eve a little bit better.
Here's what he said:
"Standard DVD's use a resolution of 720 X 480 in a 4:3 ratio.
Digital TV's use a resolution of 1920 X 1080 in a 16:9 ratio.
Take a standard picture from the internet that is 800 X 600 and use your image viewer to increase the size to 1900 X 1080.
Picture looks crummy. Right?
If you were to use a piece of software like Ben Zoom to increase the size of that same picture, it looks a lot better. That is because it uses algorithms to resize the picture. A DVD player with upscaling is the same way. Cheaper models use "image viewer" technology to upscale while more expensive models use "Ben Zoom" type technology
Another factor is the DVD itself. People take that movie, rip it out of it native MPEG2 codec and usually convert it to Avi's or Divx to upload it. Also, many have had their resolutions changed from 720 X 480 to something smaller.
Now you convert and burn them to a single layer disk. You are taking a smaller resolution video and upscaling it to 720 X 480. Then your converting the video back to it's native Mpeg2 format. Now you burn it to a single layer DVD. Home burned DVD's will never benefit from upscaling to a digital output."
