Question about fuzziness with oppo dvd player.

[slickyv]

Hi guys, I just recieved my oppo dvd player a couple days ago and have it hooked up to my syntax olevia 26" hdtv. I tried playing some dvd's ripped with dvdshrink and the image doesn't look that great. I also played some "regular" dvds and I'm not that impressed. I have it hooked up using the dvi connector. The dvds look a lot cleaner on my sony dvd player connected to my 32" crt Sony hdtv. Any tips on making things look better as far as settings? Or am I doomed because "ripped" dvd are compressed?

Thanks!

[manono]

Hi-

You're comparing a different player to a different TV with the Oppo to your LCD. Kind of an apples to oranges comparison. Have you hooked up the Sony to your Syntax and compared it to the Oppo?

First, I wouldn't use anything that's gone through DVD Shrink as a guage of how good the player is. Artifacts that may not be visible through an inferior player might show up when played through the Oppo. Second, has the TV been calibrated, at least using the THX Optimizer? Even if you calibrated it for the Sony player, you'll have to calibrate it again for the Oppo. Have you tried the different DVI resolutions to see which looks best? And I don't know what settings you're using on the Oppo, or even which firmware you have. The general recommendation is:

TV Display = Wide/SQZ (Will "pillarbox" 4:3 material with a slight penalty in 4:3 resolution)
Brightness = 0 (optimized for DVI "studio" luminance range)
Sharpness = OFF (will eliminate edge enhancement and the previously reported "shimmering")
CCS = OFF (may reduce some flicker between bright colors)
TrueLife = OFF (setting to ON will enable the Noise Reduction feature to be used)

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=491306

All that said, the Oppo quality won't shine on TV sets that small, but it still should produce a picture at least as good as that from your Sony player. If the older Sony player had only component outputs, using DVI should produce a somewhat cleaner picture. This assumes that your TV set doesn't do any digital to analog to digital conversions of its own, as many do. If this is your TV:

http://secure.syntaxgroups.com/products/specs.jsp?pid=LT26HVX

then it's 1366 x 768 and you won't get 1:1 pixel mapping. For those kinds of sets, some people find that outputting 480p gives the best picture, and others prefer the 720p. In any event, there's some additional scaling being done by your TV set.

Or am I doomed because "ripped" dvd are compressed?

My DVDs recompressed using CCE look great played through the Oppo over DVI and 720p to my 43" 1280x720 Samsung DLP. Even DVD Shrink transcoded DVDs can look great, if you're not shrinking them very much and the original retail DVD allowed some "overhead" for shrinking.