dvd not as sharp as it should be?

a fraction the size yes, but way more pixles to displaystuff on, DVDs were created with the max resoltion of tv's in mind, and recently HDTV's(1024 by 768 or 1200 x 1080i) still less than your lappy. But not for the resolution that your laptop displays things at. If you hooked your tv-out up to the tv and your played your dvd on your dvd player software, it would look just as good as if it were being played on a regular dvd player. It's all about resolution, and your laptop has more of it than the dvd can display. It can become really noticable on my laptop screen.

Im not sure why Dirgle blamed the resolution, but that certainly isnt the problem. Too me, it sounds like a bad program (decoder) or drive. Try some other software first if you can. DVDs on my 5680 look amazing, and i dont have to worry...


NOW, if you are trying to play it on the ENTIRE screen, that is another issue altogether (and sorry if this is what you meant Dirgle!). Your 50 plasma is probably running in 1080i, which is a DVD standard. However, your LCD is a higher res, and when you force the DVD to play fullscreen, it doenst have the data for that res; it must interpolate it to fit, and you get the blocky look...

High Definition

It agree and think the resolution is the proble. My DVD playback does not look so hot on full screen. One movie that I think looks good is T2 High Definition. It comes with the T2 Extreme DVD and is made to run on the computer. Its still not the absolute best, but looks pretty dam good!
If you look hard enough in the forums there was a posting of a link to download a clip of this Coral Reif Movie, and WOW, looks F*****G great. I would check it out!

What is that word? Interpolation? Anyway, it is essentially real-time transcoding of an image to display at a different resolution...

So, if you are wondering why an image scaled-up in resolution in real-time looks crappy - why do you think that it takes something like TMPGENC so long to convert a file to a different format/resolution! Games look great because they are *rendered* in real-time! And to the display resolution that you have chosen! They can only do that with computer animation of a very simple order - we are not talking Lord of the Rings Golum here! Even at it's best, displaying video at a non-native resolution introduces errors... When you go up you get noise and artifacts, and when you go down you lose detail...

DVD players have dedicated hardware designed to output the video signal at as close to it's proper resolution as possible, but the fact is that the signal is an analog world encoded into digital and then usually converted back for display. When you attempt to do real-time non-native resolution ala LCD...

TVs and CRTs adjust to the characteristics of the signal being displayed, and LCDs adjust the signal being displayed to the resolution...

Sigh...

Oh, and in case your wondering - LCD and PLASMA TVs look okay because they *don't* force the video source to the native resolution - and the native resolution is for displaying video in the first place!

It might scale better if your Sager had 1440x1050 instead of 1440x900, as 2xDVD would be 1440x960... ( i.e. 4 pixels to 1, instead of some freakish fraction! ).

have the same problem

I have the same problem, but oddly enough only after I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Win XP and all the latest drivers. Also reinstalled Win DVD 4. Before I did this DVD's looked amazing, super sharp, but now....really bad. It's the same if i use windows mediaplayer. Don't know what to do....