HDTV, regular dvds? I'M CONFUSED HELP?

[jamini.roy900]

OK, so here's the thing. We are moving into our new house and we just bought an LCD HDTV, well we haven't had our satellite installed yet but they do offer and HDTV package, do we have to get it or will the tv look crappy without it? Also the other tv we have isn't hdtv its just regular and that is also going to be hooked up to the satellite so if we do get hdtv will we have to buy another tv that is hdtv or will the regular tv just look like normal. Also we have around 400 dvds but not blu-disc. are they going to look ok on the hdtv? I"m soooo confused with this hdtv crap! HELP

 

[jb]

Standard Definition (SD) content will look ok on a HDTV. You may notice more of the imprefections in the SD content as your HDTV will not mask them as well as a normal TV would have. But it will not look horrible to the point you can not watch it. Of course when you do get a Hi Def content they it will look amazing! Most stellites system that I have seen has one HD receiver hooked up to the HDTV and a normal one to the normal TV. I think that even a HD reciver should be able to display on the normal tv but you want to check that.

Your DVDs will look ok on your new TV. Again you may notice a few imprefection just because and HDTV will bring them out more so. Since the Hi-Def DVD wars are still far from over, you may want to consider getting a cheap up converter DVD player to make your current DVD look a bit better on the HDTV.....

 

[vazel]

you may want to consider getting a cheap up converter DVD player to make your current DVD look a bit better on the HDTV.....

Or if you can get a PC near your HDTV doing some ffdshow postprocessing is amazing.

 

[hey69]

whah, with what postprocesing do you do that? hints please

 

[Zaphod]

whah, with what postprocesing do you do that? hints please

Lanczos upscaling to native resolution (keep aspect ratio, as many taps as the CPU can handle, possibly a bit of luma sharpen), denoise3d (low settings, experiment, HQ if CPU to spare), msharpen (not too aggressive, HQ if CPU to spare - more expensive than luma sharpening in the resize filter), Levels (depending on video card and display device).

Playing around with these filters (and the order they're applied) should give results that can rival most standalone players @720p with a CPU faster than a 2GHz Athlon XP (more obviously better). Use preset autoloading to differentiate between different types of sources (i.e. no deblocking for DVD and no resizing for high resolution content).

I don't know about vazel's shot above, but note that some guides and bullshots out there use settings that, while looking good in stills, doesn't (IMO) do the quality any favors when in motion (a bit like the horrible 'OMG you can see every grain of sand...' mipmap-settings advice that ran around a couple of years ago).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Lame question deleted

 

[Blazkowicz]

I don't know about vazel's shot above, but note that some guides and bullshots out there use settings that, while looking good in stills, doesn't (IMO) do the quality any favors when in motion (a bit like the horrible 'OMG you can see every grain of sand...' mipmap-settings advice that ran around a couple of years ago).

yeah I'm not really a fan of sharpening. I was shocked when seeing a bluray demo on some big LCD, with compression artifacts and an excessive sharpening post-process that degrade the quality imo.
not everything should be "sharp", and "smooth" is not another buzzword without a reason. things should be "smooth", ideally both sharp and smooth

I use xsharpen with ffdshow, "a subtle but useful effect that not only avoids amplifying noise but also tends to reduce it" to quote its comment, I like it


the other settings I use are deblocking (with 'advanced deblocking' checkbox) and luminance level fix.
no lancos resize, I simply let the vid card overlay do its work, but it's for simple PC use and my PC is not that great. (2GHz Athlon XP. also, the size of the media player window is annoying)
divx movies are greatly improved. I had dvd playback problems and had to use VLC, I actually was annoyed by the quality of raw dvd and missed much the deblocking..

it could be worth quickly trying a linux distro. ffmpeg can do all that filtering I think, it's what ffdshow is based on and what media players typically use.

have your TV well set up. on any monitor I take care of brightness first (black should be black) then contrast (100% or almost on a PC CRT monitor, else something high enough but that doesn't wash the image out, around 70%, that depends a lot), saturation well set up.
a small amount of gamma correction is useful, in either drivers or ffdshow, if it's not proposed by the TV (I don't know the state of this, it's typically not present I think)