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DVD Player With DVI Output
ffierling writes "Why are there no big name DVD Players with digital video outputs? With all the available digital displays (LCD, plasma, DLP, etc) and the obvious benefits of an all-digital connection, it's easy to conclude the threat of litigation from copyright holders is holding up the big name manufacturers. So how is it V Inc. can sell their Bravo D1 DVD Player with DVI output? Are they below the MPAA's radar, or just quicker to market?"
and it's only $199. very nice!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Fool! DVI is an encrypted data stream!
See this PDF for more information:
http://www.ddwg.org/if/data/0830991.pdf
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
If you pick up last month's Official Xbox Magazine they did a review and gave it a 9.0 out of 10 score. Apparently they loved it. If you want more information on it, track down someone with the magazine.
The main problem I have with this DVD player is that it DOESN'T seem to be available in many, if any, retail outlets.
There are additional boards available to hack most decent DVD's players so they output SDI, which is a raw professional 270Mbps standard for digital interconnects. Most broadcast quality Plasma screens include an SDI input, and companies like Delphi produce them for the consumer market, and I've seen DVB-s digital tv set-top-boxes also hacked for SDI output, they look very good since the needless D>A>D process is removed.
Not true - Samsung has the DVD-HD931 which has been out on the market for a few months now. It has DVI output.
The Bravo D1 is better, but hey.
Expect other large consumer electronics manufacturers to have their models out within a few months.
To some of us following the home theater scene, the Bravo D1 may be old news ;), but I can understand that it may not be common knowledge. In any case, the Home Theater Forum is a great resource in general and it has a couple threads on this player as well. Of note from that second link is that the Bravo is not the only DVI player on the market:
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
However even if it did I dont expect the result to be much superior than the analog RGB VGA output for the simple reason that the DVD disk doesn't have any more info than that.
for example if you try to play a dvd on an XGA or SXGA system it looks WORSE(!) than on the lower resoultion SVGA. the reason is very simple , the dvd has to interpolate the pixels and does a bad job when the image is changing quickly. SVGA is optimal for DVD , and XGA is optimal for HDTV.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What's most funny is that no one today would likely think of "ripping" a DVD from a capture card, just because all it takes is a $50 DVD drive and a braindead piece of software. And yet the manufacturers stick by their "no RGB" guns as if it actually means something.
BTW my "DVD player" does have RGB outputs. It also has a macrovision-less s-vid output.
Duh...
The reasoning behind using DVI and upconversion is that many HDTV's will upconvert 480p to 1080i or 720p internally (this is most common on DLP, LCD, Plasma, LCOS and other non-CRT technologies). By converting it internally before the digital stream is converted to analog, you should get a better conversion, or in theory you can add an external scaler (say an iScan or anything from Faroudja) and output a digital 480p signal for it to scale instead of an analog one.
The Bravo D1 is the first, and currently has better quality than Samsung, but it won't be the last for long. Popular rumor has Denon coming out with a universal DVD player (DVD, DVD-A, SACD) with DVI output (with HDCP) by the end of the year, but if the HDCP compatibility issues keep up, I wouldn't be surprised to see it be delayed. Of course, HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) is what I can't wait for. One cable the size of a USB connector that can carry an HDTV signal and 8 channels of audio, so long cable mess!
You can find the pertinent information here: Samsung DVD-HD931
Retail price is $299
TVs are actually analogx525, at least in NTSC (PAL is something like 600 lines, I forget, since I don't work with it). Due to the way color is added, horizontal resolution is limited to about 720, which is why that's the resolution we work with when we digitize NTSC video.
Some of the 525 lines don't carry picture info and are cut off by your TV. They occasionally carry program information, or in some cases, Macrovision stuff designed to fool the auto gain correction on your VCR. In any case, the lines that aren't recorded end up making 480 a good vertical resolution to use for digital NTSC video.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Actually, televisions are not like 640x480. Televisions are not digital, at least not completely. The electron gun starts at the top of the frame and paints one line at a time. By the time it hits the bottom, it's painted about 240 lines (in NTSC, that is). While painting a line, it's demodulating an analog signal into analog values of red, green, and blue. The horizontal resolution is NOT in terms of pixels or anything shaped like a dot; it's an analog signal whose resolution simply depends on the bandwidth available.
Vertical resolution is a different story. It is actually discrete and it's fair to express it as a specific integer. This is because, once the electron beam has finished traveling across the screen painting one line, it travels across again and paints another. There is a fixed number of these per frame. (And, there is an extra quirk -- you always have 60 frames per second, but you have the option of having 30 of them in a slightly different vertical position than the others, so that the two sets of horizontal lines interlace with each other.)
My point in all this is that the DVD's 720 pixel horizontal resolution is perfectly reasonable and perfectly compatible with traditional NTSC televisions -- it's not necessarily an improvement at all. Some (most) TVs will not have the bandwidth in the signal to convey that many separate pixels, but even so the result is just a little horizontal blurring of pixels. You can even think of that as a DVD being a little overengineered and using a higher sampling rate than necessary to reproduce the analog signal.
Having said all that, the day is coming when the only reasonable thing will be to record the movie at some high resolution (like 2048x1536, or maybe the 1920x1080 standard that Star Wars, episode II used) and throw only that on the disc. Then, the data can be transferred to the TV; if it doesn't have that many pixels on the screen, it can include a chip that allows it to scale and smooth the image. Of course, televisions will have to be rated in pixels, but they already are in some sense: HDTV implies 1920x1080, actually, IIRC...
Are they below the MPAA's radar /.)
Uhm, not anymore.... (that's assuming MPAA reads
Details here...
More on that unit...
The cable I CAN plug into my "box", is DVI. I have a new ATI All In Wonder Radeon. it has DVI OUT. Imagine that.
Also, there is a reason to stay digital as LONG as possible. You want the analog distance to be kept SHORT.
If you do have to have a D->A->D process, keep the A part SHORT. Use lots of long digital wires if you need to, you'll get a better picture in the end.
Take it to the extreme... Send an analog signal around the world on a copper pair.... Look at the result... Now send a digital signal around the world on a copper pair (or anything else), look at the result.. Ohhh, Digital is pretty picture.
- Voxel.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I'm guessing the reason it looks worse is that your projector can't handle those resolutions, therefore it's the PROJECTOR which is trying to down-scale the image to fit it to SVGA, etc.
I have a XVGA DLP and it looks much better @ 1024x768 than at 800x600 because PowerDVD does a very nice job upscaling the image. If I try to send 1600x1200 to the 1024x768 DLP then it looks like ass, not because of the player, but because of the DLP down-conversion.
ALWAYS watch at the NATIVE resolution of your DLP for the best picture quality. Period.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Typo Correction: the first line should read "As other have mentioned, DVI can be copy restricted, using and encrypted in transport. Also, it's a high bandwidth, uncompressed data stream, which is not easy to copy." (substiture DVI for Firewire).
The difference being: DVI is an uncompressed digital output - for connection to a display device. Since it's uncompressed, it runs at gigabit/second speeds, and is difficult to copy.
Firewire runs at 400Mbps (the new apple PC's have 800Mbps firewire), and is typically used for transferring compressed data streams (usually MPEG2) and for general networking between devices. Some displays have built-in HD tuners, and take firewire as input. For example, the Mitsubishi HDTV's. In this case, DVI is not needed, because the HDTV stream is sent over the firewire, and decoded in the internal tuner. It is then passed internally to the display, so protected DVI is not needed.
If the display does not have an internal tuner, it would have an external HD Set Top Box (STB). The STB is connected to the TV via DVI, and connected to a recorder, or other A/V devices, via firewire.
Not true. If you look at the spec for Macrovision, it encompasses about 7 or 8 layers (features) some of which are analog in nature (twisting chroma phase, screwing with the black level) and some are purely digtal and are present as detectable signatures in a decoded stream of digital video. Take a look if you don't believe me.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Arnie actually said "pair bonding." He just has that weird accent. :)