Technical > Audio/Video Chat > Program to play DVD's in 1080?

Program to play DVD's in 1080?

A Plugin isn't needed. Any media player can scale media content to match your viewing window size (or match full screen resolution).

If that wasn't the case, you would see black borders around all four sides of the picture on anything but ancient 14"/15" CRT monitors with a resolution of 640x480.

You can test various players to see which looks best, as there are differences in the various codecs used. MPC-HC, VLC, and KMPlayer are all free and good players.

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reply to Juggernaut
DVDs aren't HD. They're SD 720x480. Either go Blu-Ray or see if there's a better player that does better upscaling.

reply to Juggernaut
Thanks, gents. I guess better upscaling is what is required. I have a Samsung 2333 (24" 1080P), yet a DVD is not as sharp as I would expect it to be despite having a decent pixel pitch, .261 I believe.

Perhaps as suggested, trying different players is the option to try. Thanks for those suggestions!
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reply to Juggernaut
A few things at play here. First, play it in a window at normal size, and it will be crystal clear (at least as clear as the source disc). Second, the scaling ability of the media player codec. Third, viewing distance. At a desktop distance, any imperfections in scaling are going to be more noticeable.
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The monitor is about 2 feet away, so the codec scaling I am presuming is/ may be the culprit. The video card runs at 1920x1080.
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reply to Juggernaut
Try downloading the free VLC player from »www.videolan.org/ It does a pretty good job of stretching the picture to fit. You aren't going to find true HD quality, because there simply isn't enough data on a DVD to create an HD picture. The pixel count for an SD screen is about 1/6 the pixel count of a 1080 screen.

Thanks for all the advice, folks. Tried VLC, and to be honest, there was no difference quality-wise to Nero. It looks like a BR player is the only way to do it.

Thanks again.
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I'm not anti-social, I just don't like stupid people.

Cyberlink TrueTheatre HD is pretty good at upscaling DVDs.

Thanks, I'll look into that one a bit more.

Hope you realize that DVD upscaled to 1080p is not going to look like blue-ray or even close. Just like converting VHS tape to DVD is not going to make it look as good as a DVD.

Yes, of course.

reply to Juggernaut
I know you already realize the limitations of DVD but wanted to add that a 24-inch monitor viewed at 2 feet away is quite a short distance for a monitor of that size and if your eyes are sharp enough you will even be able to see individual pixels at that screen size. DVD will never look sharp because of the low resolution and because of the relatively large screen size.

I have a 22-inch monitor I use at about the same distance as you and I can see pixels even with my not-so-sharp-anymore eyes.