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Bads1
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 10:18 pm: | 
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Just bought a Samsung Blu-Ray. Watching Pirates of the Caribbean at worlds end right now. It is frigg'n awesome. BTW I have PC3 on a HD big screen down stairs. This room is strictly the movie room. |
Cereal
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 09:19 am: |
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"But a nice upconverting player with HDMI would be as good as most would notice."
This is true, if you have poor eyesight. I had a Samsung DVD player with upconversion and now have a Sony Blu-ray player (which also upconverts DVDs). I compared a movie that I have in both formats, and the difference is huge. Especially in darker (color not content!) scenes.
This is on a 61" 1080p Samsung. Not sure how much difference there would be on a smaller hi-def. |
Slowride
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 10:59 am: |
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So those who said BlueRay is the winner are correct, not only did the major studios get behind the format, but go check the specs on the media laptops being produced now by HP, Dell and etc.... They all are coming with BlueRay DVD players.
The XBOX360 is a true UP Convert player, as I have the 53" WideScreen with Component inputs and run 1080i, every movie I put in is upconverted and looks fantastic.
I did the research when XBOX first came out with its HD-DVD drive and I was going to pick one up, but I found out that every DVD I played in the console was being up converted. The only thing the HD-DVD drive would get me was the ability to play HD-DVD's I figured I would wait for the format war to settle down.
Wha La! BlueRay won out. So, now I will buy a BlueRay player as BB and other movie houses have a 2010 conversion timeline for the format within the store shelves. |
Ft_bstrd
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 11:33 am: |
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Here's the position I am taking.
There are few titles in HD. There are some, but not many. I may add an HD drive to my XBOX 360. They originally came out at $249. They are down to $179 and will probably fall to the $149 mark this summer since most of the HD players are $149.
Ultimately Blu-Ray will win. The difference between Blu-Ray and Beta, is that Sony now owns most of the movie houses and can control which format is released. I believe that Apple and Dell have also signed off to use Blu-Ray.
Right now the Sony, and coincidentally ALL other Blu-Ray players from other brands, are running $399. The dual players are running at $799 with very few titles available in HD.
I'm sitting out for a little while. Sony can suck eggs for a little while. I'm not going to pay their premium right now. When the players drop to $299 or less, I'll give them a shot. I probably won't build two collections, one HD one Blu-Ray. There may be one or two odd movies released in HD, but eventually you'll see more and more in Blu-Ray.
They are in 1080P not i BTW. |
Barker
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 11:39 am: |
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Slowride
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 11:46 am: |
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"They are in 1080P not i BTW."
Thats what sucks for me, I have a 1080i TV so to jump on the BlueRay train, I get to upgrade Tv's.
Now how much was the Uly upgrade again.... |
Reepicheep
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 01:00 pm: |
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I'm done with DVD's period. They are annoying and unreliable, and I am sick of being forced to watch mandatory warnings and trailers.
I just picked up an older used Archos AV500. In hindsight, I don't know that I would recommend it, but it'll work and the price was right (under $200). It works as a simple digital video recorder, and I can (in theory  ) rip video off of the DVD's and put them into a divx format, and then play them from the Archos hard drive. They will go to either the Archo screen, or to a TV.
The AV500 is limited to 720, but the new ones do better. It has 30 gigs on the internal hard drive, but can read from an external drive, and the newer units have built in wireless and will read from a network share.
My big beef with the Archos units is that they put the interests of the manufacturer over my legal fair use rights to media shift. So I have a "Mary Poppins" video tape that is 5+ years old and degrading quickly, and I want to rip it to the DVR so the kids can watch it, and safely store away the videotape...
The Archos can do it fine... but when it detects the macrovision on the video signal, it locks down so you can't play the video back anywhere but the useless little 320 pixel LCD. This does not feel like a fair balance between my rights as a consumer and the rights of the content producers... especially when the content producers are not paying for my player.
(and yes, I know about the grex and other digital video stabilizer boxes... I am debating if I go that route, or just abandon (past and future) business with hostile content producers.) |
Xl1200r
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 01:37 pm: |
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IE My DVD player only puts out 480i and that is all the TV will play, if the TV could Up-vert all regular TV would look great and there would be no need for HD channels...
This just is not true for a couple reasons.
A) HD channels would be just as useless if a DVD player could actually upconvert - i.e., folks would be able to use the DVD player or some other "device" as thier tuner and get all regular TV channels in HD. This would also make technologies like blu-ray useless.
The fact is you can buy these standalone "upconverting" boxes. So again, why do we need HD channels at all right now?
B) You're confusing upconverting with actually making a high-def signal out of a non-high-def signal. You're DVD player puts out 480i. The regular DVD only has 480 lines of resolution as well. All your upconverting does is take that 480 and mathematically reformulate it to run at 720 by duplicating some lines. You get the same 480 "real" lines of resolution.
Maybe that's all confusing, I don't know. All I'm saying is if you've bought an HDTV in the last year or two, there's a good chance it has an upconverter built in and any DVD player with component video will look just as good. |
Cereal
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 01:48 pm: |
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An easy way to explain upconversion is that the TV or DVD player guesses what would be in the missing line and displays it.
That 'guess' will never be as good as what actually should be there. |
Danger_dave
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 02:05 pm: |
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Looks like a Banksy Mr Barker?
www.banksy.co.uk |
Ft_bstrd
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 06:46 pm: |
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Think of the scaling or "upconverting" as taking a picture that is on a bulb display sign. Each bulb is either on or off. If you wanted to expand that picture to a sign that was twice the size, the new picture would have to interpret whether the "extra" bulbs would need to be on or off at which times to make the picture. Inevitably, many of those bulbs are going to be on or off at the wrong time. If you change the aspect ratio, you have to stretch the picture as well.
There are really three aspect ratios on the market: 4:3,16:9, and "widescreen". Widescreen is the format movies are in. If you have a 16:9 screen viewing a widescreen picture, there will still be letterboxes. |
M1combat
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 07:07 pm: |
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You can't "upconvert". The data just isn't there. All you can do is stretch the picture so that single lines of pixels become two.
some chips (Faroudja) do this alright but it's never as good as not having to convert. You can get a TV that will "upconvert". If you have an LCD monitor set it at it's native resolution. Then set it one step lower and you'll immediately see the difference. If you don't have a Faroudja chip you'll see (especially in text) where a line of pixels is now two lines. If you do have a Faroudja chip then the picture just gets a little blurry.
If you want to see a Faroudja in action find a Gateway 24" or larger LCD monitor. |
M1combat
| | Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 07:09 pm: |
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And most LCD widescreen PC monitors are 16:10. |
Cereal
| | Posted on Friday, January 25, 2008 - 07:30 am: |
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Thanks for taking my simple explanation and making it more complicated!
This was in IMDb's news section:
Almost Nobody's Buying HD DVD, Says Report
In yet another sign that the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray is nearly over, with Blu-ray emerging as the de facto hi-def standard, sales data, published by The Digital Bits website, indicated Wednesday that Blu-ray players accounted for 93 percent of the high-definition players sold for the week ending January 12. The week was the first following Warner Bros. announcement that it would no longer release films in the HD DVD format after April 30. High-Def Disc News also reported that during the same week movies released in the Blu-ray format accounted for 85 percent of high-definition sales. |
Bads1
| | Posted on Friday, January 25, 2008 - 07:59 pm: |
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Thanks everybody for the help and opinions. Everything looks and sounds awesome.
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Pwnzor
| | Posted on Saturday, January 26, 2008 - 12:14 am: |
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That stereo is weak. 
I have both an xbox360 and PS3 the difference in quality for streaming movies and pics is substantial. Probably because the PS3 is HDMI and my 360 is only component cables.
Xbox 360 Elite has HDMI. It looks great on my son's new 1600p Quad-HD Gateway TV. |
Cereal
| | Posted on Monday, January 28, 2008 - 02:29 am: |
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NY Times/CNet article: Sales of HD DVD players plunge after Warner move
http://www.news.com/Sales-of-HD-DVD-players-plunge -after-Warner-move/2100-1041_3-6227929.html?tag=ne fd.top |
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