dvd playback on my pc

[batosai69]

hey guys I have a little problem..I have a new Mitsubishi dlp and I have about 600 movies on dvd..as you can tell I love to watch movies..playback from my dvd player on the t.v. is gorgeous.. however since I have so many movies I am thinking about putting them on the computer that is also hooked up via dvi which I play all my pc games on my t.v. with..the games also look great at high res. on my tv. However I used a full non compressed dual layer of a newer movie and mounted it via virtualclone drive to see how movie playback would be from a mounted iso to see what the feasability would be of putting all the movies on the pc. I used the new windvd which works great however playback was grainy in the blacks just like when you burn a movie and its compressed too much the dvd itself plays perfectly through the pc so I must be missing something about playing the iso itself as I said it is an uncompressed copy so it should play and look exactly like the dvd itself....so what am I missing as there is no point in putting my movies on my pc if the do not look as good as they do on my dvd player..I am running a 4800+ dual core with 2gb of corsair ram and 2 7800 gtx video cards...please help as this little problem is causing big frustration...thanks in advance guys.

Matthew Roseberry

 

[BlueAcolyte]

ATi HD 2XXX and 3XXX series cards are supposed to have better image quality...

 

[batosai69]

not sure I understand why though the video playback is perfect from my 99 dollar hdmi dvd player but with my 4000 pc I get crummy image quality....there must be someway to get normal video or noone would be building htpc's......?

 

[taltamir]

did you make that clone yourself?
DVI to HDMI conversion can sometimes be problematic, is that what you are doing?

To compare the quality you should put a DVD in the DVD-rom drive of the computer, and then put the same DVD in the DVD player. and compare the two. Where both are plugged through the same porn on the TV, using the same cable. (plus a conversion dongle for the video card if needed).
Newer video cards have HD out, which is a special plug that looks like a circle but is NOT s-video. You connect a dongle to it that splits it into a component cable (green/red/blue colored plugs):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_video

Some even have direct HDMI output, which is the best solution. If your TV has VGA input it might be better to use that instead of a DVI to HDMI converter, as those have problems.

Can you give more info about what your are connecting and how? And try different programs for playback. Like windows media player, or media player classic (with no windows, got nothing to do with microsoft)

 

[Lord Banshee]

My guess is this,

on your 99 dvd player (assuming it isn't one of those upconverting ones) your TV has a better upscaler than the video player on your Computer that you are playing the DVD in. Now if you dvd is an upconverting one, then it has a better upscaler then your computer's media player. The things is most media players i've tried do not enhancements to videos so if you play a 640x480 video and full screen it on a 1600x1200 you will just get a pixelated video. FFDshow has many options to enchance upconverting/noise/smoothing/etc. things to video playback, if you really want to use you pc for movie playback it might be the best option. One thing though, it isn't easy to find the right settings so good luck. Here is a short guide that might help you get started if you want to go that path.

http://www.htpcnews.com/index....=view&id=132&Itemid=48


I did read right you are using a DVI from PC to computer right.

 

[taltamir]

you can actually choose the upscaling quality in media player classic... but you better have something beefy if you want to use some of the higher end ones

 

[justlnluck]

Bato, I have a 6600GT and DVDs on my LCD TV is gorgeous. It's definitely not your card. I would use AnyDVD to rip your movies and use the Nvidia PureVideo codec with Zoom Player Pro for playback. This setup upscales DVDs very well, even in overlay mode.

 

[ZoNtO]

Originally posted by: justlnluck
Bato, I have a 6600GT and DVDs on my LCD TV is gorgeous. It's definitely not your card. I would use AnyDVD to rip your movies and use the Nvidia PureVideo codec with Zoom Player Pro for playback. This setup upscales DVDs very well, even in overlay mode.

I remember MaximumPC did their HTPC article describing this very process so I second it. I don't have first hand experience though, but I use Vista Media Center and IIRC it upconverts things to the resolution you input it to. Would that work to playback ISO's if you mount them to a software drive like Daemon?

 

[TheOtherRizzo]

Try different decoders (Cyberlink, Nvidia, DScaler) and renderers (Overlay, VMR7, VMR9, EVR) using Zoom Player or Media Player classic.