macroblocking help

[guidedbyvoices]

So I have a new 46" Samsung LCD HD TV and a Panasonic home theater in a box that upconverts standard dvds to 1080p.

I know that upconverting wont make DVD's look as good as a broadcast HD channel, but I'm getting pretty good macroblocking, very digitally color blends.

Is there a way to mess with the settings to minimize that? For example, can I take down the sharpness or contrast and it wont seem so drastic? I watched Star Wars with my daughter and the space scenes it was pretty distracting.

Just not an expert on all the settings and what they do, and the more I mess with it, the worse things look, so I end up going back to the defualts and starting back from scratch

[Rachael Bee]

Try hooking up component video cables and see how that goes just watching 480p. ...or have you already?

[guidedbyvoices]

Sounds dumb, but I didnt think about that. Definitely worth a shot.

[EddieVanHalen]

Lower sharpness control!!!

[Rachael Bee]

Sounds dumb, but I didnt think about that. Definitely worth a shot.

When you're trying HDMI again, try all the ouput resolutions the player offers regardless of what might match up with your TV's native resolution. Just because it's a 720p set doesn't mean sending a 720p signal in will work best. Your TV may process 1080i better than 720p or 1080p? Your player may output a particular resolution better.

I had an older 720p panel and was never satisfied with how it did D-VHS, Blu, and HD-DVD. No matter how I hooked things up, I occasionally always got an some artifacting or blocking. I sold it and got a 1080p panel and it does better. Any artifacting it has is far more subtle.

Your TV of unknown resolution might be gonna always miscue a bit. I thought that about the ole 720p. About every 20 minutes of viewing, it seemed to cough on somethin' if I wa watching anything other than a scenery channel.

Try everything you can think of....

[Vidiot]

Compression artifacts are one of the great evils of the video business. Somebody just wrote a big article slamming Apple TV's new video downloads, pointing out that their 720P movie rentals are filled with artifacts, blocking, the works.

When you figure an HD movie on a Blu-Ray disc can take up about 50GB of space, and a 2-hour movie plays back at about 4MB a second, that's a lot of data. Compare that to what you see on HD cable or Apple's downloads, and it's not even half that.

This a brewing scandal that I think a lot of people are going to start complaining about.