Any way to get a sharper image from WinDVD?

[eviltoon]

I am rather excited to now be able to watch DVD's on my 19" screen. I have a Pentium 4 1.5 with lots of ram and am using the WinDVD 3.0 program. When I put the DVD in the drive it starts up in a fairly small screen. I believe it defaults to 720 or something like that X (whatever)...i can't remember. At this size it looks very crisp. But when I opt for full screen I am looking at a pretty awful picture. I would guess that it is just enlarging the 720 (something) and stretching it to fit. I can't believe it is working at the 1152 x 864 resolution I normally have the desktop set at.

I can see no options within WinDVD to increase the resolution. The help screens or online help do not appear to address this. Yet I have viewed full screen desktop DVD's playing in computer stores that look really crisp. Can anyone fill me in here? What can I do to improve this?

 

[richleader]

Mpeg 2 compression isn't perfect and some DVDs are encoded quite badly, they were designed really for low rez tv's, not high definition monitors.

But what video card do you have and is hardware acceleration turned on within WinDVD?

 

[eviltoon]

...oh yes, the video card is the GeForce 2 GTS 32 mb. And yes, I believe I did turn on the hardware acceleration.

Interesting point about them being "designed really for low rez tv's". To test out the WinDVD player I just borrowed the only DVD in at the local library where it happened to be an episode of the Survivior series. So, it originally being a TV series, maybe it was a bad DVD to use as my first test.

I take it that increasing the resolution on the desk top will not improve the image quality of the movie?

 

[richleader]

Nope, it will just give your card more of a workout scaling it. Yeah, you'll get better results from a real movie. But even then, it's a crap shoot. For example, the rerelease of the Crow in the collectors edition, is about 4X better looking than the original dvd release. Some of the lesser known movies from smaller publishers look like they were encoded on a commodore 64. But hey, it's a step up from vhs.

 

[Skibby9]

To piggyback on Richleader's comments (seems like I've been doing that often recently), I hear that there are "superbit" DVDs (don;t have any myself) available. Supposedly the idea is that these DVDs contain only the movie, ie. they're stripped of all the extra stuff. Apparently the extra space is used to encode the movie at a higher bit rate.

I sure notice differences in MP2 quality from media to media. Huge going from satellite (dss) to DVD, but I'd have to say that pretty much all my DVDs are really good quality.

Ok, I'll admit that my Monty Python Quest for the Holy Grail is not awe inspiring. But at least it won't degrade.