DVD playback is blurry on 27" iMac...

[Kooznards]

Is there anyway to make DVD playback to look sharper, or is that the best it can do. And will buying HD movies from iTunes look better then the DVD's?

God I wish it could play Bluray disks...

 

[Kendo]

HD movies from iTunes will look considerably better. Unfortunately no Blu-ray which is a shame considering the iMac has such a brilliant screen to take advantage of it.

 

[ZMacintosh]

is your iMac resolution set to its native/highest res possibly?

all dvds ive played and encoded dvds ive played look fine.
could just be the way the dvd was produced?

 

[iSayuSay]

Well u tried to play 480p video on 1440p display. It is supposed to be blurry and pixelated.

Even 720p videos looks a biy smeared on iMac screen

 

[iLidz]

God I wish it could play Bluray disks...

1. Download makemkv,handbrake and VLC Player.
2. Rip your blu ray collection using a USB external blu ray drive.
3. Playback your HD movies right on your new iMac. (You can also use Plex or xbmc for playback with a nice UI.
4. Enjoy beautiful HD movies!

 

[Sylonien]

Does Plex or XMBC play straight from the disc or do you still have to rip them to the machine first? Or use the 'streaming' method?

 

[Kooznards]

Wow! Thanks for all the responses. I'll have to try that iLidz

 

[Amnesiac1]

1. Download makemkv,handbrake and VLC Player.
2. Rip your blu ray collection using a USB external blu ray drive.
3. Playback your HD movies right on your new iMac. (You can also use Plex or xbmc for playback with a nice UI.
4. Enjoy beautiful HD movies!

Yeah, but what's the catch? Are the videos overly compressed? Is the audio or video quality severely or even slightly compromised? Or do you get a perfect transfer from BR disc to iMac, with full 1080p video and lossless audio, for instance?

 

[Amnesiac1]

Bump.

 

[iLidz]

Yeah, but what's the catch? Are the videos overly compressed? Is the audio or video quality severely or even slightly compromised? Or do you get a perfect transfer from BR disc to iMac, with full 1080p video and lossless audio, for instance?

I am relatively new to using Handbrake but here are some of my observations:

Handbrake has quite a few built in presets that you can use to rip your movies. Using a high profile preset will get you the largest size file with the "best" picture quality. You can also use presets for TV and/or ipods. So you have some control as to the quality of the rip.

In my experience, playing a ripped mkv file of an SD movie on my iMac is as good if not better picture quality than playing the movie from the DVD. I believe xbmc and Plex have some sort of upconverting feature built in to achieve this. (I'm not 100% sure on this, hopefully someone else can chime in here)

As for blu ray movies, I have experienced 2 different scenarios. The TV is only capable of playing back at 720, so you do lose 1080 when playing back through the apple tv. However, a high profile rip played back on the iMac via xbmc or Plex looks awesome on my 27" iMac.

To answer your question, I suppose any time you're doing some conversion to the files there may be a slight compromise with audio and video, but I don't notice it enough to be concerned about it, and in the case of SD DVDs I think picture quality is actually better on the ripped files vs DVD playback.

I really wish Apple would have added Blu Ray to the Mac line but I knew of this issue before I bought mine.... It's a pity because the iMac display is a beauty. But simply following the steps mentioned you can have HD movies playing on your machine in no time