Couple of questions about WMC...

[Per]

OK, I am running TMT3 and my blu ray copier/player is an ASUS unit.

I know its not ideal, but I have a number of DVDs that I copied over, however picture quality isn't that great - didn't expect it to be HD or near, but when I play a DVD in my Panasonic BD50 player, it does upscale the picture to a better quality than DVD, and certainly better quality than the ASUS does and therefore the quality of the ripped DVD.

Is there any bluray drive for a HTPC, or any software upgrade that will upscale the picture? I don't want to re-rip all my DVDs as Blu Rays (although I might do with some of the better ones), but I was wondering if there is any 'happy medium' for those I keep as DVD rips?

Also on the HTPC, I have all my music and I use Windows Media Player - it does a good job, but is there anything better out there - with more flexibility in terms of album art, animations, overall slickness of appearance - if there was a music player that had the same kind of skin choices as Media Centre does, that would be great.

Any ideas out there???

Cheers

Per

[elootos]

(03-20-2011 09:52 PM)Per Wrote:  OK, I am running TMT3 and my blu ray copier/player is an ASUS unit.

I know its not ideal, but I have a number of DVDs that I copied over, however picture quality isn't that great - didn't expect it to be HD or near, but when I play a DVD in my Panasonic BD50 player, it does upscale the picture to a better quality than DVD, and certainly better quality than the ASUS does and therefore the quality of the ripped DVD.

Are you using the sharpening filter in TMT3? SimHD I think?

When watching a DVD (or rip) you should see a logo at the top that you can enable/disable the upscaling feature.

I'm not convinced of its powers, but it can have a good effect on some material.

There are a couple of levels of sharpening that it can do.

Aside from that, try tweaking the color settings of your graphics card perhaps. If on nVidia, there are some sharpening function of the card that work well on MPEG2 material.

[Per]

(03-21-2011 09:08 AM)elootos Wrote:  

(03-20-2011 09:52 PM)Per Wrote:  OK, I am running TMT3 and my blu ray copier/player is an ASUS unit.

I know its not ideal, but I have a number of DVDs that I copied over, however picture quality isn't that great - didn't expect it to be HD or near, but when I play a DVD in my Panasonic BD50 player, it does upscale the picture to a better quality than DVD, and certainly better quality than the ASUS does and therefore the quality of the ripped DVD.

Are you using the sharpening filter in TMT3? SimHD I think?

When watching a DVD (or rip) you should see a logo at the top that you can enable/disable the upscaling feature.

I'm not convinced of its powers, but it can have a good effect on some material.

There are a couple of levels of sharpening that it can do.

Aside from that, try tweaking the color settings of your graphics card perhaps. If on nVidia, there are some sharpening function of the card that work well on MPEG2 material.

Not sure what TMT3 is doing, but I will check!!!

Colour on Graphics card is excellent for ripped blu rays, so I don't want to mess with it.

Any thoughts about the music function??

Cheers

Per