[jmccorm]

Work was very kind enough to loan me a 24" Sun Microsystems HDTV (wide screen) computer monitor. (Loan = keep for as long as I work for the company.) I have to say, I'm enjoying it very much on my Radeon VE card at 1920x1200 resolution!


But I realize that this is the only wide-screen monitor in my house, and I'd like to play wide-screen DVDs on it. But, even after reading some of the FAQs, I still have some confusion.


Would my best (best = cheap but still reasonably good) way of doing this (playing DVDs on this wide-screen computer monitor) would be to get a higher end DVD player and an additional component to RGB converter (the monitor only takes HD15 style VGA inputs), or to use the DVD player software that comes with my video card (to support the built-in MPEG hardware) and play DVDs that way?


Is there a major difference in picture between the two? Is there a major different in the picture (in terms of resolution, but aside from the wide-screen thing) between this and viewing DVDs on a regular TV that has component input?


I'm kind of confused which way is the best to go and what I'd get in terms of trade-offs.

 

[rbrandt]

DVDs will look better played from your computer.


Using your computer, you can scale dvds to whatever resolution your video card is set at (like 1920 x 1200). A regular dvd player will only output 720 x 480.

 

[jmccorm]

Thanks for the quick reply. Sounds good. Perhaps a stupid question, but I'm not finding my answer in the FAQs.


What would be a proper resolution to run wide-screen DVDs on, with an HDTV computer monitor? 848x480? I know I don't want to run the monitor at 1920x1200 while I'm playing DVDs, because a lot of bandwidth would be needed to scale the image up to fit the screen, and would affect performance.

 

[Mark Hoy]

You will want to run the dvd player at your screen resolution to get the best picture. Current processors should have no problem keeping up with 1900x1200.

 

[kharvel]

Yeah, if your computer is at least 1 ghz and has a decent video card, it shouldn't have any problem displaying DVDs at 1900x1200. In fact, that's probably my personal Holy Grail of DVD playback: watching DVDs at upconverted resolutions greater than 720x480


Unfortunately, the largest widescreen HDTV direct view CRT monitor with VGA inputs is only 30" (Monivision, Princeton Graphics, and Loewe Aconda). And these monitors can't display something as high as 1900x1200 (probably limited to 1024x720?). You got one hell of a monitor and I wish Sun would produce larger monitors with the same bandwidth specs.

 

[ebacherville]

Use the higer resoluton, the software scales the image up , this is the point behind having a HTPC, it scales up the image, to provide better image quality.. the more dots the better it looks.


jason

 

[jmccorm]

Thanks, all, for the advice. My test MPGs (high resolution DVD captures) seem to confirm that playback is just as smooth at 1920x1200 as it is as 848x480. Must be the hardware in the video card taking care of the scaling. Thanks for all the advice. Just got to run down the road and get me an internal DVD-ROM/CD player.


Regaring the Sun monitor, it is actually a rebranded Sony GDM90W10. Sun Microsystems Handbook Page I had to use a google cache for this, because normally you have to be logged into Sunsolve (Sun's technical database) to access this. Don't know how Google managed to cache it.


Sony has some other models out there, still 24" HDTV, that do even more resolution. I think it is hard to find something bigger that does a very high resolution. You'd think someone would have something out there for the high-end.