hi guys
i have got Terminator 2 extreme edition dvd
and taxi 3 which both have wmv hd material on them
they both blew me away with the quality of the picture and i cant wait to finish my pj so i can watch them bigger

what have you got ?

I have ZIP nadda nothing lol.

I actaully wasnt aware that they were selling HI def commercial DVDs yet.

Are they settled on one format yet?

What are are yours, Blue Ray or HDDVD?

It looks like blue ray would be a better choice from what Ive read but it all depends on what the film houses decide on I guess.

Are the settings selectable?
Can you select 720i,720p or even 1080i or p "??

Also where did you pick these up and how much were they?

Wardog

Personally I really don't like WMV9HD, I have the T2 and a few other like Step into Liquid and a few other IMAX ones, the WMV9HD does not seem to have true DTS and the HD material is not nearly as nice as true broadcast HD that was filmed in HD.

As of yet you can't really buy any of those, do to file size being well beyond a DVD (about 12 to 15 gigs per movie), but there are lots out there floating around. I like to grab them and compare them to my DVDs image. They are so much better its scary, the first movie I viewed side to side was my dvd of Hero with ffdshow alongside a 1080 version of it. If you look at the subtitles the DVD version has very distince non anti alaised looking jaggies and the 1080 versions text was crisp with smooth edges.

There is also alot of improvement to the colours and general detail but the first thing that caught my eye was the subtitles hehe.

you can pick up the trailers from:
Divx
http://www.divx.com/movies/browse.php?cate...__movies_index_
Quicktime
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/
WMVHD clips to download and dvds to buy
http://www.wmvhd.com/
do a wmvhd search on amazon

I've read as much HDTV posts as I can find, but still don't have it all figured out.
Can I play 720p content on my 15" 1024x768 monitor? Do the ends just get truncated or does the image get scaled/squished in some way? I'm attempty to play WMVHD- 720p on my HTPC via Media Player today. It looks really good, but its not true HD results because 1280x720 is being scaled to my 1024x768?

Actually I belive it gets scaled to 1024x576 or 576p but it still looks damn good, much better then a DVD if with ffdshow or dscaler filters.

And yes technically it will not be displaying the full benefits of the 720P resolution, but even 576p is far better then 480p. At 576p you are displaying 589,824 pixels of data and at 480p you are only getting 345,600 pixels of data. Where as true 720p will have 921,600 pixels of data.

To get true 720p you would need to make your unit with a 17" display as they have 1280x1024 or 1280x720 in 16:9 resolution. Or you could use a 15.4" inch display as some of those now have 1280x800 or a 16:10 version of 720p that could be scaled back to 16:9 or 1280x720 with powerstrip etc.

wardog
they are highly comresed windows media player 9 hd format discs
they are on a standard duel layer dvd but need a fairly high spec pc to run them
i got t2 from play usa
and taxi 3 from amazon france
i have also just got underworld and timeline from here
its a german site but the shop has an english option
both of them have german 5.1 and english 5.1 sound tracks but taxi 3 is in french only

High Defenition Material is more available then you might think. Its available on the USENET group Alt.binaries.HDTV. Its not very legal but its extremely available. And it has been for almost 2 years now. I have been downloading most of the movies since they were first being captured and to date ive got somewhere near 200 movies...I have a list that counts about 130 but its been a very long time since I updated it. Most of the caps are direct Transport stream copys and they are usually pretty big. They range from being 5 gig a movie to about 20 gig. But most of them are well worth it. I'm not telling everybody to go out and download them(legal issues probably) but you can download samples because most of the time the movies are cut up into 100meg pieces so you can just download a couple files and play them and see what the true potential of your projectors really is. From personal experiance I can tell you that these projectors rock with HD (Ive got a 17inch Samsung 712n with the standard triplet and fresnels)

Cool it looks like there are more options than I was aware of.
I will look around and see what can be done about starting my own collection soon.

Great thread by the way.

Oh ya hopefully this is still on topic.

Is it possible to upscale your own DVDs via software and copy that and then have your own HI DEF version of that movie or is this kind of upscaling different than what is available over the counter?

Wardog

Still working on getting some HI DEF to add to my collection

"Upscaling" a DVD to high-def resolutions won't compare to a true high def transfer. Your computer has to "guess" what information is in between the 640x480 pixels. It's information that just isn't on the disc.

However, having said that, I've been using FFDSHOW to upscale, denoise and sharpen certain movies... and it looks AWESOME. Some scale better than others... but lasty night I popped in the "Appleseed" DVD (anime. great visuals, weak story). Some of the action sequences really pop off the screen. It may not be HD, but you'd really need to know your stuff to tell the difference.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some more true HD material... plus an N6 and a new cable box!

V for Vendetta's trailer is available as a HD download here:

http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/trailer.html

There are links on that page for both 1920x1080 and 852 x 480.


enjoy!

FS