Poked around a little, not finding my answer so I decided I'd post, I'm sure I'll be humbled quickly this is probably easy:

The short of it is I'm playing DVD's on my laptop on my TV and the picture quality is poor, here are all the essential details:

(TV): Panasonic Viera TH-50PZ80U 50-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV

(LAPPY): Dell XPSM1530 with a blueray player and an HDMI out

(Grfx card): Nvidia 8400M GS

I'm using Windows Media Center (looks crappy on Windows Media Player as well) to play the DVD's in my computer on the TV (using HDMI out to third [on the front] HDMI in port on the TV).

The setup is simple, there's literally zero connections to anything other than this one HDMI cable... there are no other components involved, no receiver or speakers, and the audio is not in question here.

The picture on DVD's looks pretty crappy (talking regular DVDs, I have not played a bluray yet), the picture is super pixelated.

It's hard to be more specific, it just looks like what I would expect it to look like if it was streaming media from something with crappy bandwidth.... but it's not.

Any help?

Thanks,
D

if i remember correctly, the 8400m has a very checkered past regarding overheating. my first two things to test would be the hdmi cable and the video card. any chance you can switch out the cable and/or computer?

the cable is confirmed OK. I'm very hesitant to swap out the vcard because it's only 1 month old and I feel like there is an easier solution.

This may be a dumb question, but is there anything better than windows media player for playing a DVD?

the cable is confirmed OK. I'm very hesitant to swap out the vcard because it's only 1 month old and I feel like there is an easier solution.

This may be a dumb question, but is there anything better than windows media player for playing a DVD?

PowerDVD probably.