Why doen't my dvd movies look good on the Gateway 21"?

[Bsharp]

Id probably gonna sound really noobie but I need to know something. I recently bought a gateway 21" orginally I bought it because I wan't a better movie viewing experience and a good monitor for work. The latter was great, I love it for work but dvd movies still suck! I thought the reason my old view sonic 19" was bad for movies because its old but appearntly this new gateway isnt all that great either.

So my question is why does movies look so good on my TV? I have the Sony trinitron. Am I missing something to make the movie look as good as the TV? the Gateway should be MUCH better then the TV no?

Thanks.

[breez]

What exactly is wrong with the movie playback? It may be a software issue too.

[Bsharp]

I use Intervideo WinDVD player, am not sure if that is the problem or not. The quality is not crisp and clear like it is on the TV, its pixelated and has alot of noise. I thought it was my DVD player but I hooked up my stand alone DVD player from downstair using S-video cable and it actually looked worse then the player in my computer. I tried playing PS2 on this Gateway too using S-video cable and it look blurry and crappy.

[dfonda]

Yes it should! Tried mine out with the s-v hookup from my tv and it looked GREAT!
I had two large bars top and bottom like a tv . Changed to widescreen in the setup menu and the bars shrunk to about a third and the picture really fills the screen.

It sounds like you have something set wrong. Like the feed is bad.Did you check out all the options/

I also have intervideo windvd 4 and it looks really good also.

[z0n3]

Your gateway has a higher res than your TV so the picture will look distorted. Nothing is wrong with your monitor. Your computer is just stretching the image. When it does this the imperfections in the image are more easily seen.

[Echo_]

dvds resolution are like blank by 640 or 640x480

your monitor is like 1600x1080

thats why

[digitalrainman]

Yep. What the others said. You are watching a dvd that is at a lower res than the monitor and in turn it blows it up like a picture.

[motherboard1]

my CRT TV is a good bit bigger than my 19" monitor and DVDs look better on the TV than on my monitor

still trying to figure out why a movie can look perfect on any size TV, small < HUGE, but on a monitor the movie resolution has to be soooo high for it to look right

[TUK101]

my CRT TV is a good bit bigger than my 19" monitor and DVDs look better on the TV than on my monitor

still trying to figure out why a movie can look perfect on any size TV, small < HUGE, but on a monitor the movie resolution has to be soooo high for it to look rightBecause a TV is locked in its native resolution of 640X480 or 800X600 or whatever the high def tv's are at. The screen may be huge, but you are still only seeing a low resolution compared to a CRT or LCD monitor. I have a 19 ich Samsung fairly high end monitor and if I stretch the picture of the movie to fit my screen it too becomes pixelated, (that is the word for what is happening). It is pretty much like when you take a 1mp picture, best viewed at 640X480 and stretch it to 1024X768 and all of a sudden you have a picture that looks like somebody threw a handful of multicolor glitter on it.

[motherboard1]

heheh, still not getting it, if a TV has low resolution compared to a monitor, how does it manage to look as if it had high resolution

a CRT monitor, set to a low resolution (to match that of the DVD) should make the image look equal to the TV then ?

but it wont, will it :shrug:

and surely not all DVDs are going to match the resolution of the TV, so the TV still has to do some refitting

but the TV still always looks right.... always

[madcow235]

think about where you sit in relation to a tv and a monitor. A monitor you sit around 2 feet from max a tv you sit up to 10 feet away. If you sat 10ft from your monitor the picture would look amazing

[Quailane]

Guys, it is that TV's blur the pixels together. Sit up really close and you can tell how crappy it is. It looks better to the eyes at distance though.

[dawei213]

Ummm, guys, you are all off base. DVD movies should still look good while watching on your PC. Drop one in and see. It's not because of the current resolution you have set. It shouldn't look pixelated at all no matter the resolution.

It's usually the other way around. Have you ever played a DiVX compressed movie on the computer and looks fine but when played on a wide screen tv and looks pixelated?

Can you get a screen shot of the image when played on your computer so we can understand what you mean by pixelated and noise?

[motherboard1]

wont a screenshot taken on one persons computer, show up on your computer the way it would look on your own monitor?

or do you mean a digital photo?

[Quailane]

Have you ever played a DiVX compressed movie on the computer and looks fine but when played on a wide screen tv and looks pixelated?

Lol. It looks pixelated on my monitor but on the tv it looks fine. It is just a regular generic crt tv though. With a crt it gets blurred a bit. Have you ever tried putting text up on a tv, it is unreadable compared to a monitor at the same res.

[Echo_]

Guys, it is that TV's blur the pixels together. Sit up really close and you can tell how crappy it is. It looks better to the eyes at distance though.

all pixels are "blurred" together to make colors. the reason it is better to watch from a further distance is because the resolution is so low so you have to get further away so it looks good.

Ummm, guys, you are all off base. DVD movies should still look good while watching on your PC. Drop one in and see. It's not because of the current resolution you have set. It shouldn't look pixelated at all no matter the resolution.

wrong
dvds resolution are usualy 800x600 or 640x480

if you make that full screen on your monitor it is going to stretch it so it looks bad.

if you were right then there would be no point in having images in our computers greater than 640x480 since it will look the same if it is stretched which of course is wrong

[Evil_Eye]

Most DVDs play at really odd resolutions; like 720x576 or 720x480 (amongst others; reference here (http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/Articles/PALvsNTSC/PALvsNTSC.asp) ).

However, the most likely reason why your dvd is acting all funky probably has to do with the monitor output; more precisely the fact that most computer models do not conform with the NTSC and PAL standards out there. As a result of this, the software itself has to do quite a bit of configuring to get it to work right. That in by itself results in a loss of quality.