[Bonnie Zylka]

Hi! I am learning some Encore stuff and came across this post! I just bought a big 50″ HDTV and had some issues with getting the DVD’s to play right…so I got a new DVD player and while researching that purchase I read a great article explaining much of why this is…and you can find it here Let me take some parts of that white paper and post it here, hopefully it answers your question as to why Blockbuster DVD’s play fine!!

“In the NTSC television system used in North America, Standard Definition displays 30 still picture frames, of 480 horizontal lines of resolution each, per second. This video resolution is often called 480i, in which “i” stands for “Interlaced.”
Each of these picture frames is displayed line-by-line on the screen in two passes. Each pass consists of 240 alternating horizontal lines, which together are called a “field”. Two passes or two interlacing fields make a full frame of 480 horizontal lines. The rapid succession of each 240-line field to the next gives viewers a sense of continuous motion through “persistence of vision”, and to the naked eye the image looks solid and whole.
As TV screen sizes increase, the drawbacks of 480i become more apparent in the form of visible scan lines, flickering images, and jagged lines.

High Definition (HD) is the next evolutionary step toward better video quality. HDTV supports many video formats with higher picture resolutions. The two most common formats are 720p, in which each picture frame consists of 720 horizontal lines displayed progressively, and 1080i, in which each picture frame consists of 1080 horizontal lines displayed in two interlaced passes of 540 lines each. Better video quality is achieved by having more lines in each picture frame so more details can be displayed.

In order for an HDTV to show the best possible picture quality, the video signal must be converted to the “native rate” of the display (the primary resolution that the screen supports). This can be performed either within the TV itself, or externally at the video source. Although it is true that every HDTV comes equipped with circuitry to perform this conversion, generally the set manufacturers use basic, unsophisticated scaling chips that do an inadequate job.

The TV may enlarge the video to fill up the screen, but usually does not address many complicated issues in properly handling of the video signal to create the best possible picture quality. For optimal display result, it is best to feed the HDTV with a native HD video signal so that the TV does not have to do the zooming.
How well the conversion from Standard Definition to High Definition is performed by the circuitry in the electronic devices will determine how good the video image looks on screen. In the case of DVD, which is still encoded at Standard Definition resolution, this is almost always best performed within the DVD player so that the display’s own internal components won’t have to struggle with these steps and can simply present exactly the signal provided to them.”

The article also goes on to describe how important your connection between the HDTV and your DVD player is…particularly if the DVD player is doing the up-converting.
Your HDTV is completely digital. The only cable that transfers digital information from one thing to the other is HDMI (it doesn’t matter what kind of cable you use…dont waste your money on a monster cable!) What we used to use are AV cables (the little red/yellow/white plugs!?) and those transfer ANALOG content.
So…lets say you get a great DVD player that up-converts your SD video to HD and then sends it to your HDTV…if it sends that video via HDMI cable, it is sending HD digital video. If you have your super cool DVD player connected to your super cool HDTV with AV cables or anything else that is analog…you have effectively wasted your money! The DVD player up-converts…then the CABLE re-converts the info to analog sd and your HDTV is left doing the up-converting at the end of the connection. Which…obviously results in less than perfect color, flicker and some random happenings because the HDTV’s are built to DISPLAY…not up-convert!!

Hope that helps. It helped me a ton to understand what was going on!!