Why is the picture quality on my lcd tv better from a pc dvd rather than a conventional dvd player?

Question

When I play dvd's from my pc the picture quality is actually quite good, but if I try dvd playback from a normal dvd player the movement is very slow, the picture blurs and the contrast is pretty harsh. Is this something to do with pixels? Forgive me, I know nothing of these things....

Answer 1

This should not be the case.

A decent dedicated DVD player will outperform a jack-of-all-trades PC-DVD drive by miles (in the same way that a Land Rover will outperform any 'soft-roader' when taken off-road).

If, however, your DVD player is a cheap 'no-name' brand from Argos or your local supermarket, then that would easily explain the problems you are encountering.

Answer 2

My guess would be that your DVD player is set to output an interlaced picture (480i), while your computer probably outputs a progressive picture (480p or 768p or 1080p)

You might want to look into your DVD player's options and see if you can make the picture progressive (you will need a component or HDMI wire, composite (red, white, yellow) doesn't support progressive pictures)

Answer 3

It is because the software DVD player on your PC is caching the image - buffering it, it is also up-converting to your screen resolution.

Basically all DVDs are at Standard Definition resolution... 640x480 aka 480i.  A line being 640 pixels wide, and there are 480 of those lines.

(The video on the discs regardless of your player - Not including the new high-def bluray discs of-course)

They make special DVD players that will up convert to a high def signal, and the software that plays the DVDs in your computer will also up-convert.

Besides just making the picture fill the screen, up converting does a lot of neat things. It can do Line-doubling, so 480 lines of picture can become 960 lines.... or it can do interpolation, --lets say I have 4 pixels in an image. (2x2) I can interpolate what a 5th pixel can be in the middle of the original 4.... they can even do what's called "bob" where you take 2 480i frames and make them into one 480p frame.... (480i is interlaced, skipping every-other line each frame  (aka field) of the picture, 480p shows all lines every frame.

Your DVD player is a computer in its own right, but one made to do a specific task. I suspect it might not be the best DVD player based on what you are reporting.... or it maybe be going bad.

Now your PC has memory, RAM and all that good stuff with a nice processor.... it's is light years ahead of your DVD player, It has a lot more elbow room to do all that fancy image processing, your DVD player does what it does and that's it. If some new magical software comes out to make a picture better, you just get a new software for your PC and it can do that too now. The DVD player just gets replaced to upgrade :(