RCA cables.Quoting Daniel Davis (view post)
I'm guessing that if I'm able to force my TV into 480p, that'll be something, but I'm not sure how to do that. My TV is supposedly able to display in 480p, but I'll be damned if I know how to work these contraptions.
This is your problem. Go and buy the component cables. You will always get a crappier picture from RCA.
Just so we're clear, the ones I use are the red, yellow, white things that plug into the TV (the PS2 end is a single USB-type connection). That's RCA, right? And component has, like, 5 connections or something, no?
Right
yellow, red, white = RCA, composite, bad because they have a single connection for video.
The component cables have three connections for video - green, red, blue, one for each of the three primary colors, plus 2 for audio.
I've compared upscaling DVD's to regular DVD's, and, yes, there is some improvement. However, they pale incomparrison to HD movies.
“What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, er... an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks and that's all.”
The new Oppo DVD player arrived yesterday and I hooked up up the first chance I got. I swear I could hear the sounds of angels singing as the thing powered up.
It's a nice machine, no?
I love that it plays DivX and AVI, and also it will play .sub files which is totally awesome. Download a movie, drop the subtitle file in the same folder, and presto, the Oppo displays the movie with the subs. Awesome, awesome stuff.
Whoa, that's sweet!
It does properly convert PAL to NTSC. The problem is unsolvable. Simply put, A PAL DVD of a movie contains one less frame per second than an NTSC DVD and there's nothing you can do to ever get that frame back. It's lost when the film is transferred to DVD. PAL and Film do not mix.
That's not right about the missing frames but I've worked with converting PAL to NTSC on my computer using VLC and the results have never been good. I was able to slow down the speed but I'll occasionally get minor jumps in the picture.
I don't think this is right.
All of the PAL DVDs I own play perfectly on my DVD player.
Mine too. If a DVD player correctly converts PAL to NTSC, a PAL DVD will play without any issues. You won't even know the difference.
Check the run time of the movie as displayed on your TV to the runtime listed on imdb.com.
You do realize that everyone who watches a PAL DVD on a PAL TV will experience the PAL speed up - just about everyone in the world (except for the USA and a few other countries) has over the years been watching DVDs of movies at a 4% faster speed.
Well, I guess I'll amend my statement to say that I won't know the difference, because thus far I haven't with any R2 disc I've watched.
If you can find me a player that will slow down playback please point me to one because I've been searching for a year - I do recall someone mentioning something like this before. Most of the time you won't notice the difference in speed but if it's something like a TV show that you are very familiar with, the speed-up is very noticeable.
I'm thinking of getting the Philips DVP5900/37. Has anyone here used this model for PAL DVDs?
I don't think any of mine have been that particular Philips model, but every Philips DVD player I have used as a hacked region-free player has worked perfectly.
If my calculations are correct, the Philips DVP5990/37 that I got doesn't do PAL speed-up (you had me worried, there!). The back of the box for Boy Meets Girl (Region 2, PAL, came in the Artificial Eye Leos Carax Collection box set) gave the DVD a running time of 100 minutes and the final moment on the DVD timer said something like 1:39:48.
Although, doing some reading, it seems to PAL speedup may affect certain movies no matter which DVD player you get if the DVD you want to play is from the UK. For example, Boy Meets Girl is 100 minutes, but could be 103. DVDBeaver says something in their review that it has a runtime of "1:39:51 (4% PAL speedup)", so I'm not sure if this is sped up. Although it sounds like the normal speed to me. I wouldn't buy the player on the basis of my above statements, but maybe buy it if you want a region-free player that does a pretty spectacular PAL to NTSC conversion. I don't think speed-up is affected by it, but maybe I don't fully understand PAL speed-up in the first place.
Basically, it seems no DVD player can "correct" PAL speedup.
Yeah, I don't think so but you should be able to use some software (like VLC) to "slow down" the movie and burn a new DVD. I tried this with a Twin Peaks PAL DVD and had _some_ success.
With HD DVDs this will all be moot in the future since there's now a universal standard.
Too much work considering I don't really even notice it! Besides, I like the original DVDs too much (it's one of the reason I buy them, really. I'm a bit of a collector, you might say.) It's interesting though to hear about something like Berlin Alexanderplatz (which I haven't seen; the same goes for everything by Fassbinder), which was filmed in the PAL format at 25 fps. So when Criterion made their DVD, there was actually a 4% PAL slowdown making the movie a half hour long than its original seven hour running time.
Now that HKFlix has suspended their hardware sales, are there any good places to buy/read about region free DVD or BluRay players?
I don't know. I was bummed out to see that they did this. It also appears that the Oppo I have and love has been discontinued. Double bummer.
Crap! I hope mine never breaks down then, cuz when it does, I have a helluva lotta Godzilla DVDs I won't be able to watch. Man, I'm hoping these region codes eventually go away. They're about as good an invention as DRM.
Losing is like fertilizer: it stinks for a while, then you get used to it. (Tony, Hibbing)
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