Category Archives: Video

VHS Weirdness

Posted on August 22, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Well, there you go. It looks like I don’t have too many readers after all! Or none, anyway, that have any spare VHS tapes. Happily charity came to the rescue. More to the point, I went to the Salvation Army … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD, Interlacing, Video | Leave a comment

VHS Help!!!

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Independently of each other, my brother and my daughter have both suggested that I should do a pictorial comparison of VHS to DVD to Blu-ray. I think it’s a smashing idea and I’ve got the technical capabilities to do it. … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Blu-ray, DVD, Video | Leave a comment

HELP! Taking screen shots of Blu-ray

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Does anyone know of a tool which allows you to take full frame grabs from Blu-ray and HD DVD on a Windows platform? You can’t do it with PowerDVD (although this does provide it for DVDs). I would love to … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Blu-ray, DVD, HD DVD, Video | Leave a comment

Program content or broken equipment?

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’m testing a whole batch of TVs at the moment, and have just reached the last of the six of them. One of the first things I do these days with a display is plug a Beyonwiz HDTV receiver into … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Equipment, Testing, Video | Leave a comment

Site News

Posted on July 19, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

For a while I’ve been writing review of Blu-ray discs for Sound and Image magazine. I’ve started loading them onto this site at ‘Blu-ray Reviews‘. I expect to have quite a few up over the next couple of weeks. Some … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, How Things Work, Video | Leave a comment

Foxtel picture quality

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I don’t have pay TV. This has been a problem at times because I haven’t been able to explore its capabilities very well. But the cost to benefit ratio is, to me, too high. Over the years I have heard … Continue reading →

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Philips’ Digital Natural Motion becomes ‘Perfect’

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I went to Sydney today for Philips’ new product launch. Of most interest to me were the new ranges of LCD TVs which will be rolled out over the next couple of months. There are three ranges — ‘good, better, … Continue reading →

Posted in Equipment, Video | Leave a comment

Will Australian digital TV switch to MPEG4?

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Last night I received a telephone call from a reader who wanted to know if Australia would be switching over to MPEG4 for its digital TV broadcasts. At the moment we are using MPEG2, the same codec used for DVD. … Continue reading →

Posted in Compression, DTV, HDTV, Video | 4 Comments

How to wreck HDTV

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Last night I watched ‘House‘ which I had recorded earlier on a HDTV PVR. Naturally I recorded the high definition version from my local station, Southern Cross 10 in Canberra, which broadcasts HD at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. As I … Continue reading →

Posted in HDTV, Video | Leave a comment

Another example of lousy 576i deinterlacing

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’m reviewing a high definition digital TV receiver/PVR that, like most of them, doesn’t have the ability to output 576i over HDMI, nor to perform decent deinterlacing of it. To confirm my suspicions I took some photos. Having taken them, … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Interlacing, Video | Leave a comment