Some of my DVD's look like crap on my laptop! Help!!

Not sure if this is the right forum?

Anyway, my laptop specs are in my sig. Native display resolution is 1440x900. I tend to use Windows Media Player for DVD playback. I find some DVD's look like crap on my laptop. Kind of grainy or soft focus or something. And it seems to be noticeably worse in full screen. One even had framerate problems today (in full screen) which I always thought was a problem exclusive to videogames, not DVD! Not all my DVD's are like this mind. I'm watching Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (great film!) as I type this, and it looks beautiful. So what's up with some of my other DVD's?

 

Are the DVD's scratched or dirty? If the specs in your sig are your current laptop then you have WAY more then enough hardware to run dvd's. What else do you have running while you are watching the movies? Can you tell us how much memory your system is using during and before you begin watching movies?

 

I'm not sure my computer proficiency is competent enough to give you all that info, but I will say it's never more than Firefox, iTunes, Lime Messenger, that kind of thing running alongside movies.

 

Did a quick search for grainy dvd playback and came across this:
http://forums.tweakguides.com/archive/index.php/t-2909.html

Main I got from that post was: turn off hardware acceleration.

 

Try another dvd player. Windows Media Player isn't the greatest one to use for DVD playback. See what happens with the PowerDVD trial.

 

I always had this problem. I simply assumed that dvd's came with a fixed resolution and any media player simply stretched it to fit the screen resulting in bad quality.

 

Make sure you have the latest drivers installed too, as the video driver is often used to accelerate playback of DVD's and such.