Technical Issues and Questions

Message

porquenegar · #51 Post by **porquenegar** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 8:52 pm

flixyflox wrote:DVE won't help at all with overscanning. (But is very good for black level/white level/color settings.)

You either have to buy one of the older Malatas which had a "zoom out" function (a friend has one of these) or else go to a new generation DVD player with DVI/HDMI out (plus a monitor with DVI/HDMI in.) The result is a huge improvement in general PQ AND no overscanning. And buy the partner/wife/boyfriend flowers before you do.

Yes, correct. It won't help you adjust your overscan issue but it will allow you to measure what it is. I used it to measure what the overscan of my tv was. I then did some internet research to be able to access the tv "service" menu where I could tweak the actual setting. Be warned that if you don't know what you are doing, you can really screw up the settings for your tv. My TV had a restore to factory setting option that saved me the first time I tried it. After twiddling a bit, I reset my overscan from around 11% to 5%. The image of my TV also has a bit of a tilt to it but luckily I'm able to correct this using the basic tv viewing menus.

ben d banana · #52 Post by **ben d banana** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 5:01 am

Only set up up tonight and given a quick test run but setting the Oppo's TV Display to Wide/SQZ does in fact pillarbox 4:3 material via DVI, despite the Panasonic plasma not offering aspect ratio control (for HD and digital in). There were a couple of things I'll be watching for on future viewings since I don't really trust tonight's tired eyes, and I haven't tested it against the Toshiba SD3900 via component, but so far I'm quite pleased. Of course, the plasma is such a drastic step up in size and quality I've been spending most of the last week drooling.

Arn777 · #53 Post by **Arn777** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 7:17 pm

That's good to know. I haven't looked into changing my Denon yet to get 4:3, so may go for the Momitsu of the quality is that good.

Arn777 · #54 Post by **Arn777** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:18 pm

I haven't had much time to try other fixes but plan to this weekend and go to a proper store. A temperamental dvd player is not what I want, as I have little patience.

ben d banana · #55 Post by **ben d banana** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 10:30 pm

davidhare wrote:NOW do you wish you'd bought the 50 inch PLasma?

Nah, the 42" is plenty big enough in our living room.

The Oppo seems pretty hassle free in my limited usage, and I haven't encountered any comments to the contrary while looking into it (I too lack patience). Also, I ordered directly and they listed the value for customs at half price without me asking, which saved me some duty and taxes.

Arn777 · #56 Post by **Arn777** » Mon Nov 21, 2005 8:49 pm

So I finally bought a new DVD player and went for the fairly expensive Denon 2910. It has a picture squeeze function, so no more problems watching 1.33 films when upscaling. Interestingly, when using this function, the bars on the side become black, instead of the standard grey on the Pionner plasma, which i prefer. It also has a Black enhancer, which I find useful as the blacks were not so black previously. This works when using HDMI Component, and not HDMI RGB (I didn't know this distinction existed).

Arn777 · #57 Post by **Arn777** » Mon Nov 21, 2005 9:24 pm

I thought that do. The player shows several option for HDMI/DVI: HDMI YCbCr or HDMI RGB. I briefly went over the manual, but the difference is not very clear. What it says is that HDMI: digital video signals signals are transferred in colour space (YCbCr) or RGB. DVI-D: Digital video signals are transferred in RGB. In fact the Black enhanced function works with HDMI RGB not HDMI component.

mbalson · #58 Post by **mbalson** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 1:38 am

Ok, so I am going to buy an Oppo. Other than the normal U.S. sites (such as oppodigital.com and hkflix.com etc.), where are they available?
Ideally I would like to find a retailer based in Canada, and is it a big deal that HKFlix ships it with the upgraded remote? do other sites do this?

ben d banana · #59 Post by **ben d banana** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 2:35 am

The Oppo site lists the one Canadian re-seller. Their price is $250 CAD, they include a DVI-DVI cable and charge an extra $5 for the DVI-HDMI cable, and I don't know about the shipping. Oppo charge $30 USD for shipping and got it to me right away (although customs sat on it for nearly a week), listed the customs value at half (w/o me requesting such), and include a DVI-DVI cable and DVI-HDMI cable for free.

So far my only issue is the macroblock artefacting in particularly dark scenes on certain discs, apparently an issue with the Faroudja chip, as discussed on tech nerd sites. Otherwise I'm totally happy with it, although you seem to have more of an eye for exacting detail than I do.

therainsong · #60 Post by **therainsong** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:24 pm

Does anybody have any recommendations for scalers or upconverters? Thanks.

kekid · #61 Post by **kekid** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 3:25 pm

I preface my question by stating that I am not a technical person, so please make your replies understandable to a lay person. The question is, does it matter whether the plasma set I buy has DVI input or HDMI input? A friend tells me that the copy-protection mechanisms built into future technologies (something called HDCP?) will not work with DVI, hence I should avoid any set that is does not take HDMI. Is this true? If I invested in a plasma set/DVD Player combination that connects only through DVI, will that become obsolete in the next couple of years? Thank you.

ben d banana · #62 Post by **ben d banana** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 8:29 pm

What new set are you looking at that only has DVI input?

kekid · #63 Post by **kekid** » Sun Nov 27, 2005 5:10 pm

Thank you, Davidhare, for your response. I was considering the Runco 45 inch plasma set. I have not yet physically looked at it, but was told that it has only DVI interface.

ben d banana · #64 Post by **ben d banana** » Sun Nov 27, 2005 10:40 pm

A quick check on their site shows the information is easy to find. The couple models I clicked listed DVI w/ HDCP so you should be fine.

kekid · #65 Post by **kekid** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 1:05 pm

Thank you, davidhare and ben d banana, for clarifying this issue.

Rufus T. Firefly · #66 Post by **Rufus T. Firefly** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 7:09 pm

David, as far as I can tell the legal download sites will only give you DVD files that you can play from your PC for a limited period. They don't provide Div X files or allow you to burn the movies to DVD. I don't think the US-based sites allow non-US customers, and Telstra's version doesn't start until next month.

If you are looking for DivX versions of studio product, the ones you can download are undoubtedly unauthorised copies. If they are of copyrighted material then they are illegal copies. But that doesn't stop millions of people downloading them, as the likelihood of getting prosecuted is probably the same as getting eaten by a shark.

I've just had a look around for DivX movie sites and all I can find are sites that want to sell you file-sharing software. Given that there are plenty of quality file-sharing applications available out there for free, this just seems like a rip-off. And it is. There's information on this at http://p2pscams.info/ You don't need to spend any money to download DivX movies.

Some of the questions you asked are answered on this page: http://www.divxmovies.com/video/

In my experience DivX is OK but you will notice the difference from DVD, especially if there is a lot of fast motion or dark scenes. As the above website says, it depends on the source and the encoding. The advantage of DivX is that you can have half a dozen DivX movies on a single DVD. Most are around 700Mb in size, so they download reasonably quickly. At full speed on my connection I could download that amount of data in less than 2 hours.

As to download speed, with file-sharing it depends on how many others are sharing the file. There's some good explanations in the FAQs in the peer to peer section on http://www.whirlpool.net.au.

If you want to get an idea of the range of material available for download via file-sharing, you can look at a torrent site such as torrentspy. Basically you download a small file from the torrent site then open it with your file-sharing software, and the downloading commences.

The alternative is binary newsgroups, which have binary files split into multiple parts. You need newsreading software that will decode and combine the parts once they are all downloaded, and you also need compression software such as Winrar to decompress some multipart binaries. All of this depends on your news provider. ISPs generally don't provide much support to newsgroups or have long retention periods, and you are better off paying a subscription to a dedicated news provider such as Giganews or Astraweb.

If you don't want to break the law, there are over 600 free movies available from http://www.archive.org. These are all in the public domain, so most are from the poverty row studios and made in the '30s and '40s. Not many classics here, and the quality of the transfers is generally not good.

feihong · #67 Post by **feihong** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 2:56 am

Can anyone recommend a good dual-layer DVD burner? I'm looking to back up some of my rare discs and such.

feihong · #68 Post by **feihong** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:29 pm

I also want to add a subtitle script to my DVD of King Hu's DRAGON INN. Does anybody know how to do this?

#69 Post by **kinjitsu** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 10:02 pm

DH, have you any input re: Samsung HD 950 vs Oppo? Had been considering the Oppo but saw a store display Samsung on sale and am tempted...

#70 Post by **kinjitsu** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 12:16 pm

davidhare wrote:Sorry Kinjitsu, just back here. I dunno. Dont have the Oppo but do have the Momitsu 770 which is as temperental as hell but gives a gorgeously smooth upscaling pic. But it's so temperental I reitred it to an 850times 480 projector where it does pic to pic mapping, etc.

I'm using the ultra cheap LG model (US version called 551 or something) the Oz version called 9921. It's pretty good but not as classy a looking pic as the Momo or Oppo. I notice Gary Tooze is using a Sammy850 (US model called 541 or something. - I was never impressed with these.)

D

Thanks David. Fact is, Samsung is out since I need an all-region player, although the later models (950+) are fairly priced making them very tempting, I doubt they are easily hacked. Maybe someone else here has the Oppo and is willing to share their opinion of the latest unit. I did locate this thread at AVS which is very helpful but runs 145-plus pages.

peerpee · #71 Post by **peerpee** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 2:00 pm

jonah.77 wrote:I apologize if this has been "covered," but it's difficult to search for technical information.

I'm wondering if someone could provide, or point to, a kind of primer for copying DVDs using a Mac. I have an iBook (OS 10.4) and need to purchase an external DVD burner, then (presumably) hack it so that it will read and write DVDs from all regions. I will also need a shareware (or inexpensive) software package that will let me rip and then burn DVDs. Finally, how much storage space do I need to burn DVDs? (Since I presume I will have to save the ripped info to a drive before I burn it to a disc.)

I'm afraid I'm not very technically savvy and much of the information on the web presumes a degree of knowledge I don't have.

Any help anyone can offer would be much appreciated.

Download Mactheripper (google it) for free... and so long as Apple DVD Player is not open, you can rip any DVD to your harddrive using Mactheripper. It removes the region coding. Then you can burn those files. Latest version of TOAST is recommended for burning (you have to buy or find that).

peerpee · #72 Post by **peerpee** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 4:23 pm

I've got a cheapish Cambridge Audio DVD player with progressive scan and HDMI out, which I want to connect to a Sony Bravia 32" LCD which has HDMI in.

Can't get a bloody picture out of the thing though when the Sony is set to AV5 - HDMI. Just a black screen.

Connection via SCART works ok (but looks shit).

Any tips?

The worrying thing is that the manual says that the HDMI out on the Cambridge Audio does not support progressive scan (only via DVI (arrrghh)).

Do most DVD players with HDMI out support progressive scan thru the HDMI? Have I bought a lemon? -- Thanks.

kekid · #73 Post by **kekid** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 4:56 pm

I am getting DVDs where you cannot get to the main menu for a very long time because they automatically play a series of trailers and advertisements, and do not allow any skipping mechanism. I tried the search mode and jump to another title or chapter, . This works for some DVDs but not others. It is very painful to sit through five minutes of material before being able to see what I paid to see on these DVDs. Any suggestions?

#74 Post by **kinjitsu** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 5:59 pm

davidhare wrote:Kinjitsu here is a local site (22 pages) on the Oppo. In general people seem happy. I really wish I could recommend the Momitsu as the upscaled pic is so beautiful but it is far too "picky" about what it will or wont play.

Thanks again David. Exausive stuff.

One thing that has always stood in my way of buying another R1 player is the hacking issue, not to say I haven't successfully hacked one in the past (most often it's my computer), but if I screw up, then where does that leave me? I suppose that's what makes the OPPO so attractive, that and the fact that they are here in California and one can easily upgrade the firmware. As far as the Samsung 950 is concerned, there is a display copy on sale at my local Best Buy which is why it is so tempting, however the price dif between that and the OPPO is minimal. I know that I will considerably improve the pic on my Samsung 4261 Plasma if I upgrade from my current player (a modified all-region JVC) which only has the ability for progressive scan and hasn't HDMI or DVI outs.

peerpee wrote:I've got a cheapish Cambridge Audio DVD player with progressive scan and HDMI out, which I want to connect to a Sony Bravia 32" LCD which has HDMI in.

Can't get a bloody picture out of the thing though when the Sony is set to AV5 - HDMI. Just a black screen.

Connection via SCART works ok (but looks shit).

Any tips?

The worrying thing is that the manual says that the HDMI out on the Cambridge Audio does not support progressive scan (only via DVI (arrrghh)).

Do most DVD players with HDMI out support progressive scan thru the HDMI? Have I bought a lemon? -- Thanks.

davidhare wrote:Nick I had the same problemw with the Momitsu (initially) and an old LG LCD screen. There are two reasons why it won't output through HDMI. One is the Bravia is HDCP enabled, and the Cambridge is not. Two, the Cambridge's HDMI/DVI settings don't match your Bravia. Ring Sony for help. Or get the cheapo LG 9921.

David, didn't you help Arn with something like this several pages back? Maybe you can help Nick through the troubleshooting after he gives you more information. It might turn out that it's not really such a hopeless situation, after all, this bloody technology should be more adaptable. I guess this is something to look forward to after I upgrade my player.

kekid wrote:I am getting DVDs where you cannot get to the main menu for a very long time because they automatically play a series of trailers and advertisements, and do not allow any skipping mechanism.

You have two options, one is not to buy those sorts of DVDs (just kidding), or the other is to check your remote to see if there are two menu keys. There should be one for menu, and another for top menu, which is the one you want. However some DVD studios won't allow you skip to the top menu because they want you to watch all those damned trailers whether you want to or not.

subliminac · #75 Post by **subliminac** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 1:26 am

Add another positive vote for the Oppo from me. Works beautifully with nearly everything I've thrown at it, and their customer service is phenomenal.

I've only had a couple of issues with it, which I'm sure you've come across in your research. Audio synch has come undone on a few occasions, but I've always found that stopping and starting again brings it back to normal (and your place is not lost in the movie). The other problems I've had I think are more display related, due to the Samung LCD I owned, and recently sold. There was excessive clayfacing problems in several black and white movies I own, particularly Masculine Feminine, Shoot the Piano player, and the Bergman Trilogy. As stated I suspect its display related, but I won't know for certain until I try it out with the new Sharp LCD I plan on purchasing in a few months.