Portable DVD player?

[Rossco]

Anyone know anywhere to find good reviews of current portable players? Not for attaching to a car, just kicking about the house, lying in bed for my mum for Christmas.

I've had a look on Amazon etc but can't see much info on them and what's best.

[abigsmurf]

Gah nothing more creepy than googling for reviews and noticing that one of the reviews is written by someone with your name.

"I didn't write that! Oh.... wait a sec..."

Yay for an incredibly common first an last name \o/

Back on topic, can't really find many reviews, you tend to end up with those review spam sites. Pocket Lint has a handful of reviews of banded ones: http://www.pocket-lint.com/dvd+players . Remember cheap ones may have poor battery life and a screen that isn't full 480p/i

[Rossco]

I'll have a look at that site then cheers. What kinda resolution are you looking at for a decent one then around the £100-150 mark?

Maybe just better going in store to currys etc and looking at the ones you think play best then?

[abigsmurf]

You want one that's 720*480 really

[Salsa Party Animal]

I use notepad PC with external DVD drive when I need it. It work fine for DVD player for me.

[paulus]

You want one that's 720*480 really

Surely for PAL DVD's you want 576P (or is it 525P)?

[Lyris]

576. Although almost no DVD actually has 576i/p (or 480i/p)'s worth of detail in it.

If you could see what DVD could really do, I'm willing to bet almost nobody would bother with Blu-ray unless you had a screen size 50 inches or bigger.

[Rossco]

Honestly? Why are DVDs not using their full potential then?

[egparadigm]

Where's the like button for Lyris's comments...?

[Lyris]

Honestly? Why are DVDs not using their full potential then?

Short version: blurry pictures are easier to compress, especially at lower bit rates. And it seems that almost nobody making the things cares to change the encoder out of the blurry default settings.

Long version: when MPEG-2 encoding first started, a good number of standard def film masters were still on analogue (usually Sony Betacam SP) video tape. Analogue videotape being what it was, you could only (officially?) get so much resolution out of the tape. Everything above a certain level was really just noise, so these encoders featured a low-pass filter (basically a blurring filter) to act as a crude noise reduction control. Back when it was harder to get good results out of MPEG-2, you had to take every gift you had, so blurring the picture was a good idea.

Because of one of the stages of MPEG compression (Discrete Cosine Transform), sharp edges take up a lot of bits and are prone to showing very visible mosquito noise. So, even when ultra-crisp digital SD and HD masters with more than 4.5mhz worth of detail were used to make DVDs (that is, they had genuine fine details instead of just noise in the high frequency areas), they still insisted on blurring the picture.

If you want to see a comparison of a DVD which wasn't subjected to this process, take a look at this comparison. I did the American disc, and you can see the filtered Italian version, which was made from the same tape, for comparison. Looking at the pictures on a computer-sized screen lets you see the difference, but just imagine how pronounced it is on a 40" or even 32" TV screen: http://www.landofwhimsy.com/writings...ge-braque.html (example 4 especially). The NTSC one I did has more detail despite being limited to NTSC resolution, which lets you see how the actual number of pixels isn't always a good example of how crisp the picture will be.

Most DVDs are just so badly encoded, I sometimes wonder if they do it on purpose.