DVD Player With DVI Output 355
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?"
sweet (Score:3, Informative)
DVI has copy protection (Score:3, Informative)
See this PDF for more information:
[ddwg.org]
http://www.ddwg.org/if/data/0830991.pdf
-molo
Another Review (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem I have with this DVD player is that it DOESN'T seem to be available in many, if any, retail outlets.
SDI hacks (Score:5, Informative)
Other DVI Players (Score:5, Informative)
The Bravo D1 is better, but hey.
Expect other large consumer electronics manufacturers to have their models out within a few months.
More at Home Theater Forum (Score:5, Informative)
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 [hometheaterforum.com] is a great resource in general and it has a couple [hometheaterforum.com] threads [hometheaterforum.com] on this player as well. Of note from that second link is that the Bravo is not the only DVI player on the market:
My mac has DVI output already. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
wrong conclusion (Score:5, Informative)
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...
There are others (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Samsung already makes one (Score:1, Informative)
Retail price is $299
Re:More at Home Theater Forum (Score:5, Informative)
Lovely! Those links are referred right back to Slashdot. That's one way to avoid a slashdotting.
Other good home theater sites:
Re:DVI has copy protection (Score:5, Informative)
Fool! DVI is an all-digital video connection standard, that supports optional encryption! (well mostly all-digital, if you ignore the optional analog compatibility connection)
(though I will agree that most likely any DVD player supporting DVI will be using encryption).
I think it's called HDCP, or High Defintion Copy Protection, or somesuch.
More interesting is a DVD player that up-converts to 1080i -- I've read conflicting reports on whether those are "allowed" by the DVD manufacturer's agreement. But get that, and support for the MS (ugh) HDTV-lite codec (like on the new T2 disc) and you're in busines. Sort of.
Re:DVI has copy protection (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DVI has copy protection (Score:3, Informative)
Re:There are others (Score:2, Informative)
Call Samsung they have a firmware upgrade (CDR) that will upgrade the unit to work with Toshiba and Sony DVI sets.
Re:1920x1080??? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:1920x1080??? (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Re:My mac has DVI output already. (Score:2, Informative)
The point of the digital connection is not that it transmits more information, but that it loses less information during the transfer. Analog signals degrade over the length of a cable. In fact, the more information is being sent, the faster it degrades, which may be why XGA looked worse on your projector than SVGA.
below radar? (Score:4, Informative)
Uhm, not anymore.... (that's assuming MPAA reads
DVD-HD931 (Score:3, Informative)
More on that unit... [1-877camcorder.com]
Re:My mac has DVI output already. (Score:1, Informative)
rather its the dynamic changing image that has a problem. because the signal is interlaced the odd row pixels are slightly different in time than the even row pixels. thus when the XGA tries to interpolate vertically to fill in the extra pixels odd things happen. its really noticable when fast moving sharp edges move across the screen (a car door slams or text scrolls). you get this zigizag unstable edge.
in contrast with svga these is no interpolation. yes the interlace images are still out of sync. but all the projector has to do is show the pixels as god or the person who made the dvd intended. no interpolation. it works well.
I would expect that if there is a place where the difference between DVI and RGB will show up its not in the resolution. rather it will be in the color saturation and the contrast ratio. However, projection video systems under $5000 dont have adequate contrast or saturation to detect the difference. you can however see the difference on an LCD screen.
***experimental details: display the image on an xga projector. find sharp details and view them up close and from far away. next project an svga signal either on a true svga projector or on the XGA projector in non-interpolated mode (use the zoom lens to resize the screen). look at the same details. I've tried all of these configurations. I've alsoe tried different sources like computers, prgressive scan dvd players and non-progressive scan ones.
Re:Um... NO WRONG BZZZZ. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
always watch at your proj.'s native resolution. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:DVI is no problem. How about Firewire/Component (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:sweet (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Macrovision? Pshaw. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My mac has DVI output already. (Score:3, Informative)
"for example if you try to play a dvd on an XGA or SXGA system it looks WORSE(!) than on the lower resoultion SVGA."
Suuuure buddy. Keep on feeling good about your low res setup. Nothing wrong with it after all. But if you've ever actually seen a truly high end home theatre digital projector, you'd know that they ARE NOT 800x600. And you'd notice that DVDs look pretty fucking good at higher resolutions as long as you aren't using a low quality business projector with a video processor designed by for $300 by grad students over a short weekend. Video processing is key.
Re:sweet (Score:3, Informative)
That 270 megabit speed is just 33.75 megabytes per second. The latest Seagate SATA 7200 RPM drives are have a sustained write speed of 32 to 58 megabytes per second. See the PDF spec [seagate.com] for more information. These drives are not exactly speed demons and most 7200 RPM IDE drives from the last few years will be able to handle that fairly easily.
This is not the stretch you seem to be making it out to be.