DVD's show compression artifacts more on a HDTV?

[Wile_E]

Wow. I went TV shopping this past weekend and looked at some HDTV displays. I went to a couple of "high-end" electronics shops, not your Best Buy,etc... The guys at the store allowed me to see what a standard DVD looked like on HDTV. What amazed me, was how poor some of these DVD's looked on HDTV. I know DVD is only 480i/p. But I could see pixelation and other problems, due to the MPEG2 compression. MPEG2 really can strip out detail, but I didn't know it was THAT BAD! I wish they had a LASERDISC player to compare. At least Laserdisc's retained all frames of the movie, even if it was analog.

This makes me wonder why movie studios decided to support the DVD format ? Weren't they originally AGAINST using the DVD format because of the compression? They wanted a format that would retain all frames of the movie, like Laserdisc did?

[edDV]

Laserdisc is recorded in standard NTSC (or PAL) format. If the material originally was film, you can construct the original film frames by reversing the 3:2 field sequence but the players had no progressive playback capability.

For film sources, DVD is encoded with both fields for each movie frame 24fps. Progressive DVD players can then reconstruct the frames and output in progressive 60 frame/sec streams for display on a progressive HDTV.

I hope you were watching progressive playback from DVD to HDTV using the DVD player to create the progressive stream. The results are usually much better than by using the TV set's own deinterlacer. This is because the local HDTV deinterlacer is working from a 480i input.

DVD playback can be very good on a 480p progressive display. As you scale it up you are magnifying any defects.

Laserdiscs can look very noisy on a HDTV.

[guns1inger]

You also need to be careful about the TV it was demo'd on. I have seen expensive plasma screens show banding, especially in blues and flesh tones, that were not a flaw with the disk, but a flaw with the TV. There is also the issue of what is actually HDTV, given that many plasma TV's claim HD status because they can take a HD input (component or digital), but don't have the native pixel resolution to actually display the signal without down converting and introducing artifacts.

[Verbatim9]

The good news, of course, is that in five years or so somebody will hopefully have won the new format war brewing over the successor to DVD, and we'll all be able to go out and buy our favorite movies all over again, in a more detailed format.

The lack of detail doesn't get to me that much, though...if you have a progressive scan DVD player, it does let you see more detail than you can on a normal TV, and the artifacts from stretching 480p to fit a 1280 x 800 screen aren't usually enough to distract you from a good movie--and if they are too bad, you can always watch it without setting your TV to zoom in, at which point artifacts aren't really noticable.

It is funny, though, how HDTV makes you want to watch a movie when it's being broadcast on live TV, instead of going out and renting the DVD...so much more crisp detail does make it worth it to have to sit through the ads.