Everything is grainy when full screened

S

s4rge

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 3, 2003
Messages
459
How do you guys deal with this? Specifally, the guys with big monitors. My monitor is 28 inches and DVD's look perfect when small-medium but soon as i put them in full screen it turns abit grainy. Its like resizing a small picture to a big picture which is normal.

Im sure this is normal but how do you deal with it??
:eek::mad:
thanks
 
Typical resolution of a DVD is 720×480 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL). Your monitor's resolution is 1920x1200. When you put it full screen, the player must upscale the 720x480 picture to 1920x1200.

1920 divided by 720 equals 2.666. That means when you upscale, you have to discard or invent a lot of data because the pixels don't match up. Imagine displaying a 7x7 picture onto a 10x10 grid - there's no way you can make it look right.

If you want to make your movies look perfect full screen, buy Blu-Ray DVDs. Those are 1920x1080, which should display properly on your 1920x1200 screen, with only a little bit of black bars on top and bottom.
 
Don't ya wish there was a nice little Film Grain Setting like in Left4Dead :D
But yes evilsofa is right. You can't make something from nothing. It does suck but you have no choice but to get stuff that scales better. That's a major reason I stuck with 1920x1200 instead of going 2560x1600.
 
Scoot back! You're seeing things you've never noticed before due to the size magnification probably. Video cards have been adequately scaling for a long time now, unless you have really old hardware...
 
You need to pick up your mouse and speak these commands in to it:
"Computer: Zoom and enhance image 75%"
 
LOL.

Blu-ray drive and the overpriced movies to view on it, that's the only solution I'm afraid.

Of course, if you are willing. Using Media Player Classic with FFDshow video codec, you can reduce "noise" significantly, but other problems arise such as blotchy areas of color or large blocks of color. Also older analog based content tends to have more noise than newer digital content intended for DVD.
 
that's not the only solution actually

get a TV :) I can play standard DVDs on my 1080p 42" Plasma without any problem, they look amazing actually, and I'm playing them off of an xbox360 which upscales it to 1080p I believe.
 
I recently discovered this when I moved to a bigger screen. DVD watching sucks. Looks much better on TV. Viewing HD broadcast over cable (QAM) is awesome though.
 
The only real solutions are to sit farther back or switch to Blu Ray. Sitting at a desk 3 feet from a 28" is like sitting 5 feet from a 46" HDTV. Upscaled SD is going to look grainy and/or blurry if you're too close, that's just how it is. Ideally your monitor has a good height adjustment on it and you have a chair that leans back nicely and has a high back. Move the keyboard out of the way, raise the monitor all the way up, and put your feet up on the desk. This way you'll be more comfortable and farther from the screen.

That said, you might be able to get it to look better or at least be less annoying by adjusting how it gets scaled up. One option is to try a different DVD player program. Some scale better than others. Another is to try different screen resolutions and let the monitor or video card handle at least some of the scaling. Some vid cards can scale up for an LCD themselves, just look around in the control panel. My laptop doesn't seem to like the idea, but if I remember right the 7900GTX in my desktop will.
 
evilsofa said:
Typical resolution of a DVD is 720×480 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL). Your monitor's resolution is 1920x1200. When you put it full screen, the player must upscale the 720x480 picture to 1920x1200.

1920 divided by 720 equals 2.666. That means when you upscale, you have to discard or invent a lot of data because the pixels don't match up. Imagine displaying a 7x7 picture onto a 10x10 grid - there's no way you can make it look right.

If you want to make your movies look perfect full screen, buy Blu-Ray DVDs. Those are 1920x1080, which should display properly on your 1920x1200 screen, with only a little bit of black bars on top and bottom.
Click to expand...

It will not look good even if you upscale it by an even factor, you are correct but I'd say that the effect of not being able to scale by an even factor is completely negligible in this context.

The picture quality of DVDs is just horrible anyway.
 
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