NOT A PROBLEM But worth mentioning

[monzie]

OK, I now have 6 DVD players around the house (and 'obviously' TV's / pc displays) and i just want to mention this>

Some DVDr's give a lower quality picture on SOME players (like almost svcd/cvd quality) on some players yet give A1 results on other players..yet its the same disk (so same bitrates/res etc coz its the SAME DISK)....yet in THEORY this should not happen as the DVDr's are compatable with all players yet picture degregation takes place.....this leads to THESE questions:

Forget INCOMPATBLE media and freezing/skipping/macroblocks etc but explain WHY picture res and sharpness suffers from one player to another....after all data is data (if readable).

What causes the lack in picture quality......and why?

How many people have ACTUALLY probed into this phenonemon?

[jimmalenko]

How many people have ACTUALLY probed into this phenonemon?

You can keep your probing to yourself ...

I haven't done that since .......... ummmmm .......... nevermind j/k


Have you tried all 6 DVD players hooked up the one display/TV ?

[ZAPPER]

I ain't no expert but I would say that to be fair you would have to be making the compareson on the same TV set. That said, I don't find it so hard to beleive that two or more electronic devices would have a wide varience in quality or performance. I mean just look at things. There are surely different quality components in the differing sets. And each may have or use different filtering or noise reduction methods. Any adjustments made at the factory could vary from unit to unit of even the same brand and to expect every manufacture to hold tight to any industry standards is asking for minor miracles. Even if the manufactures hold to the specs theese are probally a range and not a single point

[reboot]

I've gone through 6 players also, all on the same TV. Bring on the expensive Sony, Panasonic, et al, my $40 cheapie still plays more formats, at better quality than most others.
Some are slightly noticable better quality, but won't play one or the other of the mixed formats my disks are in. Nor will some of them play certain media types (-r +r), nor will some of them play the unbranded cdr's or dvdr's I use.
I imagine the same player, made a week later, could be completely different.
On a side note, my burner has better quality playback on the computer, than my 16x player...go figure...

[lordsmurf]

I have.
It's quite simple: different decoder chips.
There are more, but that's usually enough.

[reboot]

I thought there were only 3 basic decoder chip mfg's. Would that account for players that will/won't play certain media types, or is that something the mfg's of the unit do to screw up the chips? Like disable (or enable) +r for example?

[Deekkeed]

I think one of the biggest differences in the quality of various DVD players is in the final video circuitry. Every player has differently designed circuitry. Some skimp on quality components and circuitry design to save money. Even with a decent decoder chip the final video circuitry can still degrade the video.

deek

[solarfox]

That's very true, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's a big part of the difference in picture quality.

Remember, no matter how good the MPEG decoder may be, eventually all of that decoded digital information has to go to analog before it feeds into your TV's composite, S-video, or RGB inputs, and at that point the quality of the components, the design of the circuit, and proper PCB layout and RF shielding around critical sections will make a huge difference in how good the video output will look.

[pijetro]

reboot wrote:

I thought there were only 3 basic decoder chip mfg's.

But i thought there was only ONE Smurfette??
What are you up to LordSmurf??

[monzie]

Happy New Year!!!

Thanx for all the answers so far, but in my experiments I DO use the same cables and the SAME TV and the SAME DVDrs for the experiment so I can only guess that either:

a) Its a TIMING issue...from DVD laser to TV electron beam....due to the refraction qualities of the media from certain media with certain players.

b) Its a DVD BITRATE pickup from disk issue (not all the info is picked UP..again refraction and possibly timing..or internal circuitry)...I've never heard of this but COULD it be possible?

c) as said above its due to commonly sourced BUT NOT always EQUAL quality parts...but then why do commercial DVD's look good (on all players) OR different DVDr media look good on some but not all.

or

d) As JIM notes I need to stop (I never started Jim...but glad to hear you've now stopped) probing......