Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

clear dvd imac

9

9hundred

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 18, 2003
51
0
On the fp imac why when you play a DVD does it not display clearly? It is digital isn't it, so it should be crystal clear.
 
Are you running the screen at it's maximum (native) resolution? If not everything will be blurred. Also if it's blurring durring fast action this is a problem with LCDs in general unless you get a very expensive one which has a faster display rate.
 
Mac TV

I am running my screen at full resolution, but it still appears slightly pixelated. If I buy the formac tvr device will this make a noticeable improvement in the tv quality on the imac fp display?
The formac device uses dv and connects through firewire. I had a look at eyetv, but someone said it would be too slow to keep up with live tv and the quality is no good. I would like to watch tv on my imac without any loss of qulity or lag.
 
Perhaps you're looking at an interlaced DVD, does it seem as if the image is build up by horizontal lines? It's most visible with horizontal movements.
 
I have tried several dvd's and they all apear pixelated in a blury way. Is this they dvd's should always look on an lcd display? If so, is there anyway to fix or improve the quality so that it looks like what you would see on a television screen?
 
I agree with the poster of this thread. I have never had a DVD look good on my 17in FP iMac. For one thing, (with the exception of UHF by weird al) none of the movies take up the whole screen. They are widescreen, but they play letterboxed within a certian space. Also, the color look all washed out and as the guy said, things look pixelated. I figured that they would look as good as they do on my TV, but everything looks much worse.
 
Originally posted by Groovsonic
I agree with the poster of this thread. I have never had a DVD look good on my 17in FP iMac. For one thing, (with the exception of UHF by weird al) none of the movies take up the whole screen. They are widescreen, but they play letterboxed within a certian space. Also, the color look all washed out and as the guy said, things look pixelated. I figured that they would look as good as they do on my TV, but everything looks much worse.
Click to expand...

Your LCD is many, many times higher res. then a TV. If you connect your iMac to a TV the picture will be great on the TV. DVD's aren't extremely high quality, not high quality enough to look good on a 1440x900 LCD.
 
Originally posted by icetraxxg5
Your LCD is many, many times higher res. then a TV. If you connect your iMac to a TV the picture will be great on the TV. DVD's aren't extremely high quality, not high quality enough to look good on a 1440x900 LCD.
Click to expand...

Yep, you are 100% correct. A computer monitor (any kind, be it CRT or LCD) displays a much clearer picture than any TV can hope to accomplish. While this is great for reading text and looking at pictures, its sharp display also brings out the low quality of a DVD - which is the pixelization you are seeing. It usually looks the worst in dark parts of a movie. What you are actually seeing is compression artifacts of the DVD. If you happen to have the TV out connector for your iMac, try hooking it up to a TV and watching the DVD like that. I bet you won't notice the pixels.
 
Originally posted by icetraxxg5
Your LCD is many, many times higher res. then a TV. If you connect your iMac to a TV the picture will be great on the TV. DVD's aren't extremely high quality, not high quality enough to look good on a 1440x900 LCD.
Click to expand...

This is a good point and brings up an assumption I made. Are you playing them at full screen or are you playing them in a window? They will never look good at full screen because to play at full screen you have to double or triple their pixels as full resolution for a DVD is aproximately 700x500 depneding on the wide screen format etc.. Therefore if you have a screen resolution of 1440x900 the DVD will look best in a window that only occuppies about 30% of your screen. This is the downfall of LCDs with there fixed resolution. CRTs on the other hand can reduce their resolution and run at a closer to native resolution for the DVD. Another thing is that CRTs have a sort of softness to them that covers up the grain in a DVD when it's expanded where as an LCD is very coarse and exact and causes every bit of grain to be seen.

Another factor can even be your video card. ATI video cards have always for some reason rendered DVD video better and relieve the more of the work load from the CPU. So if you're watching a DVD on a computer with an NVidia card you might want to watch your cpu load and make sure that you aren't overloading the cpu causing rendering artifacts.
 
Originally posted by MacBandit
This is a good point and brings up an assumption I made. Are you playing them at full screen or are you playing them in a window?
Click to expand...

After I made my first post, I popped in the bonus DVD that came with my Ben Folds Live CD, and played it "normal sized" in a window, and it looked great. I guess your idea is right. I hadn't though about it, but it must be true that when you play in fullscreen, the image gets doubled, thus making it look bad, especially, as you said, in the dark parts. Hmm...
 
imac dvd picture

Watching anamorphic dvd was one of the reasons for buying the widescreen imac.

Whenever a video signal is manipulated quality is affected.

Pushing 480x720 pixels to 900x1440 is going to do this.

Having a software decoder is another reason.

I have viewed dvd it it's native pixel resolution in the dvd player window and it is much clearer

I do feel with the advantages of lcd (sharp
no flicker perfect geometry and conversion) I can overlook the flaws of a softer dvd picture.

Yes, It does show the flaws in the dvd format. Which might be ok in the land of blurry cable tv, but, next to high resolution digital images on a computer or a high definition tv broadcast they look very weak.

Give HD-DVD!

-I
 
Originally posted by 9hundred
So Is there no software or hardware that can make the 17 inch widescreen display like a television?

I had a look at some displays like the sony computer/tv display. Are these the only options for using your computer monitor to display a clear television image?

http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INT...B&ProductID=.NgKC0.N_aEAAAD1WySiJcCE&Dept=cpu
Click to expand...


Even those aren't going to give you absolutely clear full screen television. The reason is that any time you go full screen with a television image on a monitor either LCD or CRT the image has to be manipulated someway. The Sony screen that you are referring to probably has on board hardware decoding which would probably improve it but it will not look as good as on a normal television. Try to imagine taking an image of say 5x4 inches and stretching it to the size of your computer screen. That's what's happening. Now if the computer screen only had a resolution of about 500x400 then it would look like a normal television.

With any situation if you want to watch telivision full screen on a computer monitor your going to get better results with a CRT monitor as you can reduce the television resolution down to 640x480 which is much closer to the native television signal.
 
magnifying glass

most live tv is output 320X240 so when you magnify that to say 1024 X768
any inperfections will be magnified.
same with DVDS.
Most dvd are output to 640X480 or 720X480 so when you magnify that to 1024X768 or higher anything bad will be magnified.
The video card helps especially ATI's but there is no way to get around it completely and since LCD's are slower than CRT's and not clear (blurry) at non native resolutions 640X480-720X480 dont expect too much.
i think dvds look fine on the imac considering all of these obstcles.
it's like a magnifying glass, imperfections will be magnifid when viewed at other than the native source resolution, only slightly though.
 
small screen window

Originally posted by 9hundred
So Is there no software or hardware that can make the 17 inch widescreen display like a television?

I had a look at some displays like the sony computer/tv display. Are these the only options for using your computer monitor to display a clear television image?

http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INT...B&ProductID=.NgKC0.N_aEAAAD1WySiJcCE&Dept=cpu
Click to expand...
actually the only way is to reduce the movie on the Lcd to its original size, which will leave you with a lot of back space around it. or go down to 720x480 or 640X480, but on lcds doing this will make it more blurry.
 
tv/video imac is not

Can I use the 17 inch widescreen on the imac with a pc for games?

Also, I was thinking of selling this imac for a pc with a sony tv/computer flat display that properly displays the tv and video. For this price it is silly that the beautifull sceen cannot display tv/video nicely and clear.

There is no hardware/software solution....
 
Someone tell me about tv/computer displays please. Thankyou for your time.
 
Originally posted by 9hundred
Someone tell me about tv/computer displays please. Thankyou for your time.
Click to expand...
TV - low resolution, low speed (24 fps or so)

computer - much higher resolution (anywhere from 2X to 7X for most standard size stuff), much higher speed (60 Hz).

1 Hz = 1 Hertz = 1 cycle per second = 1 fps = 1 frame per second

LCD is not a true display with regard to Hertz (a CRT is). Each pixel is not flashing (1 cycle is off-on), but rather blending (each pixel is made of 3 primary colors - which explains lack of true 100% black or 100% white) at a rate similar to 60 Hz. CRT's can go much higher than 60 Hz. 60 is usually the minimum to look good (no visible "flicker") to most people on a CRT. This is why people say that a lcd is "slower" with more "artifacts" than compared to a CRT.

This is why the widescreen lcd format is mostly being ignored by major computer makers. Any benefit as a computer display is nice, but it does not translate to watching a dvd on said widescreen display. There is also more than one widescreen resolution (standards... what?), and more than one method of drawing the screen (interlace or not).

As many have said before, a dvd is junk to watch on most computer screens unless you view in a window that is sized to the res of the dvd. This coupled with the fact that lcd's suck for re-sizing (native resolution vs other sizes)...

CRT is better than LCD for watching a DVD.

TV is best. The media is designed for TV.
 
I watch a lot of DVDs on my 12.1" iBook at 1024X768, and I never notice any artifacts. The picture is clear as a bell. Why not just tell him to lower his resolution on the iMac when he watches DVDs?

Regards,
Gus
 
Originally posted by Gus
I watch a lot of DVDs on my 12.1" iBook at 1024X768, and I never notice any artifacts. The picture is clear as a bell. Why not just tell him to lower his resolution on the iMac when he watches DVDs?

Regards,
Gus
Click to expand...
Doesn't work well... what was once 1 pixel of info is now 1/2 or whatever. Usually makes everything "fuzzy" looking. This is further aggravated by the relatively large pixels of most modern lcd screens.

Your iBook is most likely the best lcd that Apple sells. Plus, at such a low res, to move things about isn't as obvious.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back