720p movies on a 1080 screen?

Not sure where to post this.

Currently im watching my 720p movies on my notebook that as 1400x900 screen and im soon going to buy a new notebook that has i can choose between a 1600x900 or 1920x1080 screen. Now i'm a bit worried as how a 720p movie would look like on a 1920x1080 screen, perhaps even smaller then im seeing now i suppose? And if i stretch the movie on that it would become much more pixelated?

 

It doesn't seem pixelated when I play them on my HDTV. I don't download the 1080 resolution because I found when you're sitting 10 feet back, you really can't tell the difference between a 720 and 1080 movie.

 

But im not talking about TV but notebooks!

 

Hello,
DVD’s are 720p and I watch them on a 1920x1200 screen all the time and they look great. I use powerDVD 13.

 

DVD's and HD 720p are completely different, and DVD's are only 480p. In any case a quality encoding of 720p looks fine on a 1080p screen. I watch them this way all the time on my notebook.

 

Resolution isn't everything. Bit rate and encoding quality are equally important if not more so for visual fidelity. Which is why I prefer even DVD's to Netflix's "HD" and other online video streaming. These have tons of compression artifacts and visual glitches. Even YouTube's 1080p and 4K suck because of the low bit rate. But it's a necessary sin because of course not everyone has the 30-50 Mbps connections needed to stream native Blu-ray quality content over the Internet.

 

It will be fine on a 1080p screen. I'd go for it. The 1080p resolution will be much better in the long-run.

 

Power DVD13 has enhancement software that improves the quality of mediocre DVDs.

They don't suck, but no steaming can match even the quality of a well made blu-ray disc. Even so, you need a quality monitor large enough to see it.

In the case of a laptop, its doubtful you'll notice any difference between 720p and 1080p on a screen that small.

 

OK "suck" may have been too strong of a word. I can still remember YouTube's pre-HD days. Blurriness and tons of visual glitches? Ugghh. Anyway, I can definitely see compression artifacts and color banding, especially during periods of fast motion and quick transitions on dark backgrounds, on many 1080p YouTube videos. It's even there, faint but definitely there, on some of the 4K ones. All of this on my Y500's 1080p display, on my Dell 24" 1200p monitor it's even more noticeable. Certain types of videos are more susceptible to showing them than others, and of course the uploader's encoding settings affect it as well. But I do believe YouTube's maximum playback bitrate for 1080p tops out at 8 Mb/s, quite a far cry from the 20-40 Mb/s video bitrate of the typical Blu-ray movie. Not sure what YT's 4K video playback bitrate is but I'm sure it's also much lower than that of native 4K content.

 

OK, lemme rephrase then. I have my blu-rays ripped to my hard drive. I ripped them at 720p because I found in testing, 720p resolution showed up on both my notebook screen (1920x1200) and HDTV (1920x1080) just as clearly as a 1080 rip. Since 720 and 1080 are the same aspect ratio, a 720 resolution movie will not suffer any weird stretching or pixelation due to the difference in resolution.

Regular DVDs are 720x480. The HD DVDs (may they rest in peace) could go up to 1080p resolutions.

 

My XPS has 17.3 inch 1080p screen.
And i watch movies in 720p which looks excellent.
I have tried 1080p but i fail to see any improvement over 720p on such a small screen. Probably couldn't even tell in blind test that which one was being played. So i stick to 720p only.
I am sure if we are talking about some 24 inch 1080p screen, then 1080p content will definitely look better than 720p.
And yeah, 480p looks crap on my laptop.

 

I had done a test on this same topic about a year ago. 720p HD vs 1080p FHD. I did this because 1080p was significantly larger in storage size. On my M17xR4, I did not find any difference between 720p and 1080p of the same movie. If I looked closely, some frames did appear to look better on 1080p, but I had to look very closely to notice the difference, something you don't usually do when watching a movie.