Watching DVD's

O.K., I did a search and found nothing with my problem.

I have been trying out my new imac for a week now and I can’t figure out why the resolution sucks when watching DVD's. What I am trying to say is when I expand the movie to full screen, the picture is pixilated or more grainy ( just not clear). The video quality is nothing like watching the same movie on my 50" big screen. Am I missing something?

I have the basic 27" imac from Best-buy. Would that be my problem? I figured the machine would be able to handle dvd's with an over the top HD picture.

Thanks for any replies!

In layman's terms.

Your DVD is at max 480p resolution.

Older TVs are the equivalent of 480. Todays TVs are 720p and 1080p.

To put the resolution of your Mac in those terms, it would be 1440p.

Watching a DVD on a 720p TV - not bad.
Watching a DVD on a 1080p TV - not good.
Watching a DVD on a 1440p screen - even worse.

Most of todays TVs and DVD players have a built-in upscaler to help with this issue. Some are better than others. Computers do not have upscalers built in.

There is no difference in taking a 240 or 320 you tube video and trying to blow that picture up full screen and taking a 480 video and trying to blow it up to 1440. With a computer, that's what you're really doing. A DVD is never going to look as good as it does on any TV on the market at this time vs. trying to watch it on a high resolution computer monitor.

I always wondered this myself. Thanks Bob.

Thanks! Makes sense to me. I guess I thought it would be built in on a pc this size.

I guess to take advantage of the resolution, I can download the HD movies off of the net. like iTunes or netflix.

Thanks!

Not really sure if any of Netflix is in HD, although their quality has gotten to be very good with the movies I've watched on my 1080 TVs lately. They're not quite up to hulu HD streaming quality.

The HD TV shows and movies in iTunes and Amazon (I use both of these) are 720p. I'm impressed with how good they look on my TVs - even up to 65", especially when you compare their file size with a B-R file size. Would think they will look pretty good on your monitor also.

I've never owned a computer monitor with a resolution as high as the 27" iMacs, so I can't really say except to speculate.

Also, I believe there's a setting so that when you watch a standard-def DVD, the monitor will not "blow it up" and instead black out the unused portion of the screen so that it can be seen in correct resolution/definition.

bobtomay said:

Not really sure if any of Netflix is in HD, although their quality has gotten to be very good with the movies I've watched on my 1080 TVs lately. They're not quite up to hulu HD streaming quality.

Click to expand...

Much of Netflix streaming is now HD. It's real good quality, at least as good as Hulu.

schweb said:

Much of Netflix streaming is now HD. It's real good quality, at least as good as Hulu.

Click to expand...

The last couple of movies I watched were pretty good. Have not kept up with the specs of what they've been doing. Nice to know they're trying to stay with the pack.

They've actually had HD for years on most if the devices other than PCs and Macs. That was due to licensing, but they started to roll it out on Macs earlier this year.

My problem is probably that over half the stuff I watch from Netflix was made in the 50's and before.