Quote:
Originally Posted by
rdgrimes 
A few words about DVD 24P since there seems to be a lot of questions.
1) Very few displays correctly handle 24p input, and most still pull it down to 60 or some other derivative of 60. Unless your display is known to correctly handle 24p, there's not much to be gained from using it. While this is also true of BD 24p, that causes fewer playback issues since it's usually encoded at 24p.
2) Almost all DVDs will have some cadence errors and can cause blips, skips or image tearing which may or may not be noticeable or irritating to some viewers. DVDs are not mastered with 24FPS in mind. Some displays seem to show the errors more than others. Prolonged stuttering of the video is the worse case scenario. This can be corrected sometimes by pausing or rewinding.
3) Very few movies have much of the kind of panning, zooming and full-screen motion that 24p will tend to help display more smoothly. so the benefits of using it is limited at best.
4) Bottom line: unless you can demonstrate that your display correctly handles 24p, and that using 24p produces smoother motion, there's no point to having it turned on given the playback problems it can create. It's a nice marketing point, but in reality it's not much help and does nothing for actual image quality.
Well, my Pioneer Elite Pro-150FD does support 24 fps natively, and I can tell the difference during pans.
Right now I have an Onkyo 805 (like the Toshiba XA-2) which does a perfect job of playing DVDs with 24 fps output. Even some educational DVDs are shot on film. Only a few in my collection need to be 30 fps.
The Pioneer has an "Advanced" mode which turns the screen to 72 fps for everything EXCEPT 1080p60. It obviously cannot keep switching the screen playback rate based on content -- only on how the connection is set.
It is easier to force the 1080p60 or 1080p24 output modes on the player, for DVDs (BluRay should be automatic I hope), and leave the TV alone. This way, 1080i content can be forced to the right playback mode, and the TV always does the right thing.
So, yes, I do need the ability to select 1080p24 vs. 1080p60 for my DVDs, and need to be able to program a macro on my Harmony to either switch it, or get me to the correct menu to switch it.
Is the Oppo good for this? How well does it do with 1080p24 output from film-based movies? It sounded like you were playing down the feature because it might not work well. This is the opposite of my experience with my HD-DVD player.
