Component Video vs. DVI (sort of)

[dclee012]

Out of curiousity, I'm wondering which is better in this situtation:

I have a 20" LCD screen for my computer with DVI, VGA, and Component inputs. I connect the PC via DVI and it looks great. DVDs play great. But I'm wondering, could DVDs look better if I feed in a stand-alone DVD player (progressive) through the Component inputs?

Thanks.

 

[themisfit610]

No. Component offers a very good signal quality, but DVI is still better, given that with DVI the data stays in the digital domain all the time. Of course, there may be some sort of conversion going on in your LCD somewhere but it's unlikely.

You can obtain a better picture by using a high quality DVD playback setup on your PC, such as using Media Player Classic, with ffdshow processing the YV12 output of your MPEG-2 Decoder. A lanczos4resize up to your LCD's native resolution (maintaining aspect ratio of course) will look quite nice. This is basically what the "high definition dvd players" do, they take the DVD, and use a high quality scaler to output 720p/1080i/p. lanczos4 is a very powerful resize algorithm which can produce results equal to or better than dedicated hardware scalers in my opinion. To learn more about this thing, do some reading over at doom9.net, specifically the forums. Read a lot, and ask questions AFTER reading and doing some searches. They're all very smart, helpful people, but dont like to be bothered with the questions that have been answered a hundred times.

~MiSfit

 

[Sonikku]

For a fixed pixel display like LCD, a digital DVI cable is a little better. Make sure it's a digital one. There are several DVI cables, one of which is analog.