Watching movies on 9260/1- grainy??

Can anyone who owns a Sager 9260/1 tell me what the quality of the picture is like when watching a DVD?

On my one it looks grainy as if it's at a lower res or as if a normal picture has been artificially stretched so it looks a bit cruder and colours a bit washed out. This isn't a new problem, it's been like that since I got it, but never really watched DVDs on it before. Other things look fine (games etc.), it's just for movies.

I'm running Win xp (pro), use latest "klcodec" codec pack, Win media player 11, and SLI turned on. System info is in my sig.

I can make it slightly better with the digital vibrance and image sharpening in Nvidia control panel, but not as clear as viewing same DVD on TV.

 

1920x1200 resolution is too big for DVD. You will need to see a movie in 720p or better off 1080p in order for clear picture (HDDVD / Blu-Ray). Those movies look absolutely amazing. Go to the following link: http://www.stage6.com/videos/search:1080p

 

Thanks for link. Not sure about the whole HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. I think I'll wait until they duke it out and see who wins before I buy anything. I presume if I lower the res then the DVDs would look sharper? Or maybe uglier if not at native res. I'll give it a go when I have time.

I remember reviews saying DVDs looked great on this machine.

 

A DVD is only 500 lines of resolution. If your viewing it on a 1920x1200 screen then it will be stretched to fit. That may be making it grainy to look at. Blu-Ray looks quite nice on it. Some poor quality DVD's look awful. But good quality ones look good. (To me anyhow)

 

Using media player to upconvert wont give you very good results. I use Theatertek and Zoomplayer. With either you should see a noticeable improvement.

 

I haven't noticed it myself maybe on a couple of movies. Give VLC a try since you are looking around.

 

Cheers for the replies. I tried VLC recently and it did look marginally better, but I started to get odd software conflicts so I uninstalled it. I might look around for another media player which can be used for music organisation and playing DVDs. Any suggestions?

So will lowering display res improve movie quality or make it even uglier? I noticed that ATVs and Mpegs tend to look cleaner than DVDs which I was surprised at. Widescreen movies also tends to improve the look. I'm glad this is the norm as I just had to replace my video cable not to long and that was that fiddly.

 

Maybe just try another codec? I haven´t any issues with VLC to date. I know there is a new release out in the past couple of weeks. I use it mostly because it works for me and it is the same in windows as it is in linux.

 

Yeah, you CAN spend the time and the 500+ dollars to buy/find a blu-ray player for your 9260, I for one am waiting to see who wins the fight for the market before making the jump.

I am for blu-ray, for it's 100 gb disc space, the only con is it's low data transfer rate. (based on samsung tests, I don't know if it's retail yet, and if it is, it's really expensive per unit).

Good luck on finding one!

Here's help, this thread seems to have answers.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=196332