DVD/Blu-Ray - looks bad (AW)

Have an AW that came with Vista Home edition. First thing I did when I got it was format it and install Vista Ultimate. I have everything working fine, except the DVD/Blu-Ray player.

I tried to use the Sony Recovery DVD I burned to reinstall the "WinDVD BD for Vaio" program, but I get an error when it tries the install, and it fails. The error is just a popup that says "Error: 505: 41". I get the same error whenever I try to install anything from the recovery discs.

I download a trial version of WinDVD. The DVD plays, but it looks bad when switching to full screen, or anything near full screen. It's just grainy - not good quality. Looks the same if I play it in Windows Media Player or anything else.

I've made sure the drive is up to date with the latest firmware from the Sony support pages.

I tried to download this update for the WinDVD program:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VGNAW125J&upd_id=4486&os_id=34

It doesn't seem to do anything - I assume because this is an UPDATE and I don't have the original program installed.

I currently have driver v6.0.6001.18000 installed for the Blu-Ray/DVD drive.

Can anyone tell me what I can do to improve the playback quality at full resolution? I've tried with several different movies.. its all bad.

 

I recommend trying VLC and download these codecs.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_klite_codec_pack/tech/

 

Thanks. Installed that pack (the full pack) and it didn't help. Although I'm not sure if there were other settings I should have changed.

I've tried lots of different media players with the same result. Most of them have an option to view the video at 100%. Which is about 4 inches wide and a couple inches tall. Very small on this 18" screen. When I switch to full screen mode, it simply takes that 4" wide picture and stretches it - which is why the quality is so bad. I can't find any way to make the DVD play at full resolution.

 

can you exchange the AW?

you shouldn't have to fight with it to play DVDs or BDs.

 

DVD video probably doesn't look that fantastic because you have dragged out a low resolution video in comparison to your screens resolution. You could try looking for some way in which to 'upscale' the dvd resolution but other than that you will just have to live with it.

And it would seem your laptop and the version of windvd sony provided you with is only happy with vista home premium as it was on the recovery partition. So if you want the blu ray playback that is probably your best option.

 

Are you using Sony's AW video drivers?

 

I understand that. I just don't know why the resolution for the DVD is so incredibly small. On my other two laptops the DVD looks great at full resolution, but on the AW it's obvious that it's being stretched.

The screen is 18 inches. Even if I only make the DVD picture about 10 inches wide, it's still obviously grainy and stretched.

 

If using VLC, you do not need to install additional codecs. VLC uses its own internal filters to handle stream splitting and decoding. Keep in mind that despite being able to handle all kinds of formats, VLC is actually a lower-quality player than many others.

Aside from VLC, you should take a look at CCCP (namely, Media Player Classic with the ffdshow filter). ffdshow is regarded as one of the highest quality non-commercial (eg: free) players.

For commercial players, you should consider PowerDVD as it will enable use of the nVidia PureVideo decoder for MPEG2/DVD streams, which may very well give you the best quality possible. A number of other commercial players also feature PureVideo, so be sure to shop around.



Aside from that, keep in mind that all DVDs are encoded with a 720x480 MPEG2 resolution (and either resized-at-playback to 640x480 for 4:3 format, or 853x480 for 16:9 format). Since the AW comes in either 1680x945 or 1920x1080 screen resolutions, there will be a substantial amount of upsampling involved for fullscreen (especially on the latter). It is unavoidable no matter what player you use, and DVDs with poor film quality (eg: the original picture is substantially noisy/grainy) simply can't be helped.

 

If DVD looks that bad with an 18.4" laptop, I can't imagine what it would look like with a 50" HDTV without upconverting.

 

Well not all 50" HDTVs have 1920x1080 resolution; a number of them have a 1366x768 resolution, so a DVD picture doesn't need to be upsampled as much. Also, high-end HDTVs often include dedicated high-quality imaging processing chips that can enhance the video signal in the same way PureVideo works (as compared to software decoders).



Also keep in mind, because of the laptop formfactor, you will most likely be seated about 2 feet from the screen. But for a 50" HDTV, you would most likely be seated 10 feet away. So artifacts from upsampling will be less noticable.