DVDS do not look good?

dmxdex2020 · 14 Oct 2009 at 12:46

Decided to try out some dvds on my 24" 1080p BenQ monitor. I am running through VGA. DVDS look very grainy, i tried terminator which is an old movie mine is the special edition one and does not look bad on my old standard TV, and then i tried terminator 3 that also is very grainy. Why is it grainy i though my monitor would auto upscale it to 1920x1080 resolution. Or is it down to running through VGA?

PistolPete · 14 Oct 2009 at 13:07

If you run the monitor over VGA, the monitor will upscale = Bad Quality.
If you run it over DVI, then you have the option in most graphics cards to get the GPU to upscales it = Better Quality

However, bare in mind that you are attempting to scale 720×576 to 1920x1080, which is 5x the number of pixels - it's not going to look fantastic.

Dreadhead · 14 Oct 2009 at 13:09

Your graphic card should do the upscaling not the monitor.
Make sure that your desktop resolution is set to 1900x1080 and the rest should take care of itself.

Has the monitor got a DVI input? if so it may make a difference changing interface. I know an old graphic card I had was terrible at outputting highdefinition at 1080p over VGA, as soon as I switched to a more modern card and used DVI the picture cleared up a treat.

dmxdex2020 · 14 Oct 2009 at 14:06

No all i have is a VGA cable, i put a dvi converter into the div slot on my gpu and ran the Vga cable through that, the screen still says its D sub though. I will buy a HDMI cable next week.

Toastor · 15 Oct 2009 at 09:51

What you're seeing is down to the fact that DVD's were designed for regular non-HD TV's. DVD's are encoded to run at a resolution of approx 640x480, and even at that resolution grainy artifacts are visible if you look for them. Now that the world is moving to HD setups, people have realised how poor DVD's look at higher resolutions - the poor encoding quality is much more obvious. Add to this the fact that computer monitors are designed to be as clear and sharp as possible, whereas TV's are designed to blur the pixels a little, and you can imagine why the picture quality looks bad on a good quality TFT monitor. As others have said, decent DVD playback software with good quality up-scaling will help. Otherwise, it's time to make the shift to Blu-ray which is encoded at HD resolutions.

EsaT · 16 Oct 2009 at 13:55

PistolPete said:
If you run the monitor over VGA, the monitor will upscale = Bad Quality.
If you run it over DVI, then you have the option in most graphics cards to get the GPU to upscales it = Better Quality

Scaling of material is always done in PC when output resolution selected in graphics card's settings is display's native. (games again can use different res than Windows)

Toastor said:
What you're seeing is down to the fact that DVD's were designed for regular non-HD TV's. DVD's are encoded to run at a resolution of approx 640x480, and even at that resolution grainy artifacts are visible if you look for them.

and you can imagine why the picture quality looks bad on a good quality TFT monitor.

Yep, only reason why DVD looked so good originally is that starting point was so craptacular VHS.

It's not exactly only about quality of monitor but also about technology. In CRT there was always certain level of blur/smoothess which worked to hide low res and compression defects but in LCD computer display image is always pixel precise and hence works as GIGO.