Movies that are made for 1920x1200?

H

[H]adouken

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 31, 2008
Messages
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Sorry I've never watched a blu-ray before nor do I know if that's what I need, but but what kind of movies do I need to be getting to watch them at full quality and resolution? I'm trying to watch a DVD and it looks pretty crappy on fullscreen. Any insight on this is appreciated.
 
Standard high-def (bluray disk and the now defunct HD-dvd) are for 1920x1080. This means you will have black bars on the top and bottom of a 1920x1200 monitor (unless your monitor supports 1:1 pixel mapping). I wouldn't worry about it too much though, black bars are inevitable since not all hd films are shot with the same aspect ratio.
 
I dont care or about black bars, I like them in fact. My problem is my optical I just bought doesn't support blu-ray, it's an LG that does everything else. Damn I don't know what to do here! I wonder if I can still buy these defunct HD-DVDs? But then again who knows if it'll even play them.
 
Blu-ray capable machines are still a big deal, unlike DVD and CD drives. Buy any run of the mill drive I can all but gaurentee you its DVD RW capable, most are DVD-DL RW capable too. Getting something thats BD-RW capable requires you to intentionally spend the extra $100 for it.

The same went* for HD-DVD. getting an HD-DVD drive by mistake doesnt happen.

Theres alot of ways you could watch BD movies on your computer, the most obvious of course is go out and buy a new BD 5" drive. They go for ~$150.

Aside from that, the question is: do you have a blu-ray player of any kind?
 
Why not just get a PS3? It's a very decent BD player with firmware updates.
 
Ladic said:
did you seriously expected to get a Bluray drive for $25? of course it wont play HD movies.
Click to expand...
Where did you get the impression that I expected to get a blu-ray drive?

My problem is my monitors resolution is this high and I didn't realize regular DVDs wouldn't scale very well without pixelating/blurring, not that I didn't know what a blu-ray drive costs.
 
With VLC you can crop a 16:9 dvd to 16:10 and it will be full screen. You won't be able to see as much of the picture but it won't be stretched.
 
[H]adouken;1033642785 said:
My problem is my monitors resolution is this high and I didn't realize regular DVDs wouldn't scale very well without pixelating/blurring
Click to expand...

The simplest option to make normal DVDs look better would be to increase your sitting distance, (about 8 feet from a 24'' screen to make the pixels blend, NTSC/DVD was developed for relatively small TVs from large distance.

To see what blu-ray would look like download a few HD resolution movie trailers.
 
DVD = 720x480 resolution, so unless you've got an upsampling upconverting DVD player - some software can do this also - the resolution is going to be "small" compared to HD spec: either 1280x720 for 720p (the "i" interlacing is fading fast so it's pretty much all "p" nowadays), or 1920x1080 for 1080p.

Upsampling/upconverting software can take the small(ish) 720x480 DVD content and scale it up quite nicely, to be honest, it just depends on the particular software you might use.

"Movies that are made for 1920x1200" means High Definition which means either getting the now-nearly-totally-extinct HD-DVD movies (Fry's carries thousands of 'em for $5 a pop nowadays) or move to Blu-ray, there's not really much else in terms of options.

As noted, try grabbing some 1080 High Definition movie trailers from www.apple.com/trailers, or go to www.wmvhd.com and grab some HD content there as well.
 
Nice, the information I was looking for was that I should get 1080p movies, thanks! I'll also look into that software, any recommendations?
 
PowerDVD has native Blu-ray support, not sure about HD-DVD support. But when you say "I should get 1080p movies" you have to realize that means a Blu-ray disc or an HD-DVD... :) Yes, you can get some content online but, realistically there's no legit way to get full blown 1080p movies aside from maybe Netflix and their online streaming, which is limited (I think) to 720p content. 1080p content would require a lot of bandwidth to stream effectively and still maintain the compression, even with h264 re-encoding.

But then again, Windows 7 has native h264 support now, outta the box, with Windows Media Player 12 or any media player you wish to use. :D
 
I bought my bluray drive for $80

Thats about the cheapest they go for currently and you can find some at that price on the harddeals forum or fatwallet/slickdeals. Don't think there are any right now at that price but they do come up fairly often
 
[H]adouken;1033642509 said:
So what should I do to watch high-definition movies? Tell me what my next option is since I cant do blu-ray...
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torrents?





shiftyeyes.gif
 
Other than blu-ray, you can also download video in a variety of HD formats.

avi, mkv, wmv can all do 1080p (1920x1080), though MKV was specifically made for multiple streams and HD content (and is a free open format).
Frankly if I already own a movie on DVD I don't feel I am doing anything wrong grabbing a 1080p version to enjoy on my 24" lcd here.

Anyone know if x.264 codec (used on bluray I believe) is more efficient/better looking than xvid? In my limited hd video experience on the pc, xvid 1080 rips have looked better and been smaller than x.264, which seems weird since xvid is much older.
 
technically it is wrong by law because dvd's and blurays are different formats.. its like saying if you own the vhs but download the dvd.. by law its illegal.. but honestly who cares..

x264 if encoded correctly is more efficient in every way to xvid/divx.. better compression with a ton more video bitrate along with better audio.. just make sure your using the correct codecs for it.. FFDshow or coreavc.. if your using this display on a computer and have a nvidia 8800 or newer card or an ATI HD series card you can use DXVA(hardware acceleration) with mpc-HC which has all the codecs needed built into it.. the problem with copyright laws at this time is that they are flawed.. just like games are.. even though you buy a movie.. you technically dont own it.. you just own the right to watch the movie.. same with games.. you technically dont own the game.. you own the cd-key that comes with it.. eventually these laws will change thanks to the change from physical media to digital media..

and btw.. its not illegal to download movies its illegal to distribute the movies.. this is a rule that the mpaa/riaa try to hide when taking people to court.. which is why you only see them taking people to court that are sharing files.. and not downloading them..

if you want me to post some screen shots to show the transparency between x264 and the actual bluray source to show you the difference between x264 and xvid to the source.. just let me know either in here or pm me and ill post them..

and for those of you that want to be the little goodie too shoes.. yes i do buy movies.. but i usually download them first to see if its worth me wasting 30-50 dollars on a movie.. and i usually buy them for the deleted scenes and extra's that come with the movies..
 
How can you guys torrent these things? A single one is like 10 gigs!!!

@sirmonkey, yeah sure post the shots! Thanks!
 
^ Same. Its really never a problem of connection speed, as it is seeders actually...seeding. (and people not hit and running)
 
for me its a problem with bandwidth because i have comcast.. not the connection speed.. but i already know ways around it and know the rules.. as long as comcast does not have a bandwidth meter comcast can not legally drop the service.. spent 3 hours on the phone arguing with them over it and in the end i won.. and they werent happy :p

http://img.phyrefile.com/granddk/2009/01/17/source1.png
http://img.phyrefile.com/granddk/2009/01/17/encode1.png
http://img.phyrefile.com/granddk/2009/01/17/source2.png
http://img.phyrefile.com/granddk/2009/01/17/encode2.png
http://achumpatoxford.com/u/files/111/e3d960fe861d815ae3c376b4458e204f.png <--source
http://achumpatoxford.com/u/files/111/d4497049f9d3b85f32ebf2e07dfda43b.png <--encode

theres just 2 movies for an example.. first one total x264 size was 10.18 gigs second ones total size was 8.80 gigs.. those 2 examples just shows what x264 is capable of..
 
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