Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
DVDs are cool in many ways.
Okay, especially in one way: the possibilities of extra material!
Sure, when compared to ancient steam-powered VHS the coolness is just incredible, but that's sort of granted by now. We have moved on since the collapse of the Roman Empire after all.
Anyway, what I really want to get to here is something that has actually disappointed me with DVDs lately:
Image compression.
I have seen a few DVD movies on various good-to-great quality TV sets, and it's looked great. Then I've seen one or two on laptop screens and that's been okay for all the limitations of LCD. But now I've connected Pomum to my 17 inch monitor and watched a few films like that, and I'm shocked!
There's so much compression it's just awful! Enormous chunks of garbage flotating around wherever the image dares to go even the slightest bit dark and featureless. Don't even think about getting a pitch black image!
I must have been spoiled by DivX codecs and other high-quality computer-centric video playback. That, and watching on too sharp screens. Maybe this is why they say monitors are unsuitable for movie watching, not from size but from showing all the compression artefacts too much ...
July 5th, 2003
Did some quick testing. Watching the same film clip on the monitor when connected to Terminus and Pomum respectively, and it's clear that Pomum's graphical abilities have something to do with the situation. Quite a bit in fact, there's a whole lot fewer and smaller artifacts when things come from Terminus instead. Could this be a 32 bit converted to 24 bit problem? LCDs don't do 32 bit (right?), so maybe Pomum's graphics card only outputs 24 bit, converting things down in the process? I don't know (not yet anyway), but it's a bit of a pity there's neither a DVD player nor enough power in Terminus to play high-quality films smoothly.