DVD Playback on Imac

[iMaccore2]

On my imac, when I playback a dvd, it plays at a low resolution, maybe 400*600. This is annoying, because when I watch in front row I end up with a fuzzy picture. When the dvds are played on a TV, they are much sharper than on my imac. Is there any way around this??

By the way I use the preinstalled dvd player

 

[CaptainChunk]

On my imac, when I playback a dvd, it plays at a low resolution, maybe 400*600. This is annoying, because when I watch in front row I end up with a fuzzy picture. When the dvds are played on a TV, they are much sharper than on my imac. Is there any way around this??

By the way I use the preinstalled dvd player

Standard NTSC DVD resolution is actually 720x480 (720x576 for PAL). Keep in mind that your iMac's screen is much higher resolution than that, so when you're playing in a large playback window or through Front Row, the image has to be upscaled to fit the screen. The higher native resolution the screen, the bigger this problem becomes when you play a DVD at full screen.

TVs are designed to be much better suited to DVD playback than computer monitors. If your TV is a CRT, it will always look better because analog tubes are not fixed pixel displays and do not need to upscale.

 

[iMaccore2]

Standard NTSC DVD resolution is actually 720x480 (720x576 for PAL). Keep in mind that your iMac's screen is much higher resolution than that, so when you're playing in a large playback window or through Front Row, the image has to be upscaled to fit the screen. The higher native resolution the screen, the bigger this problem becomes when you play a DVD at full screen.

TVs are designed to be much better suited to DVD playback than computer monitors. If your TV is a CRT, it will always look better because analog tubes are not fixed pixel displays and do not need to upscale.

The movies look much better even on my pioneer 42"

Thanks for the help, and I was also wondering of Hd dvd's will play on my imac

 

[akm3]

The movies look much better even on my pioneer 42"

Thanks for the help, and I was also wondering of Hd dvd's will play on my imac

HD-DVD will not (and likely never) play on your iMac. Blu-Ray discs will never play on your current iMac, but possibly might be added in some future revision.

I believe Apple has no impetus to add Bluray because they want people consuming their HD movie content through iTunes via AppleTV.

 

[wilfried]

If your TV is a CRT, it will always look better because analog tubes are not fixed pixel displays and do not need to upscale.

What the heck does this mean? Standard NTSC resolution is 648 x 486, and a standard CRT television can display just that many pixels. When playing a 720x480, it would have to downscale to fit the pixels to the lower resolution; actually, the extra pixels get lost off the edges of the screen. Fewer pixels means less information means less detail. The whole point of a HD screen is to get more pixels to make it possible to display more information and more detail, but of course the screen can't create information or detail if it isn't in the source. You may not get the "softness" on a CRT television you get on an HD screen, because it doesn't have to "stretch" the resolution to cover more pixels. But instead of softness you get more graininess, and some lost pixels to boot. The pixels on a CRT are certainly fixed in number, size, and position; does "fixed pixel" have some other meaning?

An HDTV can't display more pixels than the source any more than a computer can. If the picture looks better, it's because it handles the upscaling better, or more likely, simply because you're sitting further from the screen so you don't notice the lack of detail.