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hometheater wrote:

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I think you guys may be misunderstanding what "upconversion" means. NWG is right. Every DVD gets upconverted when played back on a 1920 x 1080 display. Otherwise you would be watching it in a little window in the middle of your screen. If you are sending a DVD over component video, the TV itself does the "upconversion" to make it fit. A Upconverting DVD player (or Blu-Ray) takes the 480p image that's recorded on the DVD and adds the information BEFORE it sends it over the HDMI to the TV. (Component video can absolutely send a HD signal just typically not the upconverted signal) I am not surprised that a $40 DVD player did a worse job of upconversion than your 1080p TV.

Stretching a 4x3 image to a 16x9 image is also not upconversion. It's an aspect ratio adjustment. I also like the side bars for 4X3 - that's a much better, clearer image.

People ask me - What's the difference between this $600 tv and this one for $6000? They are both 1080p! the difference is in the chip sets - the algorithms that take these older resolutions and add all that information - on the fly - in real time. That's not the only reason, there are the refresh rates, the contrast ratios, other features, etc. But a huge expense on these displays are these chips. Similar chip sets do the work in the player or in the AVR before it hits the TV. Which does it the best? Depends on your equipment.

I also want to mention that blu-rays are not only about a better picture. The added storage space also allows for uncompressed audio soundtracks. The Dolby True-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats are only available through the HDMI connection on a receiver that can handle it, but it is as different as SD to HD. (in my opinion) Check out 3:10 to Yuma on a high-end system - it's amazing.

OK, so I was under the impression that the only upconverting done by the TV was pixel replication. Based on what you said, that's not accurate, and that's why I didn't see a huge quality difference between the component and HDMI outputs of my cheap DVD player. The TV was, as you said, doing a better job of upconversion than the player. Thanks for that enlightenment.

Since you brought up audio, I have some questions about that as well. First, as you noted, the HDMI cable can carry the True-HD audio as well as the HD video. The designers behind this interface were probably thinking that consumers were tired of that horrendous cable mess behind the entertainment center, and had this brilliant solution to put audio and video signals on the same cable. But did they consider the fact that most HDTVs do not double as surround-sound systems? I don't want any audio going to my TV, because I never use those thin little speakers that it comes with. What good does it do to put the audio signal on the video cable when the destinations for the audio and video signals are not the same device? I realize that the TV probably has an audio output, so you could send the audio signal from the TV to your sound system, but why would you not want to connect directly to the sound system rather than routing through the TV? And if you just want audio on your TV speakers because you don't care about an awesome sound environment, then why do you need more than just standard stereo audio on the HDMI cable? Is there a situation where it just really makes sense to have a high-definition, uncompressed, mutli-channel audio signal on the HDMI cable that is connected to your TV? Also, do any blu-ray players provide True HD or DTS-HD Master Audio over the coax or fiber outputs? Are there any sound systems that can handle these audio formats over such inputs? I have a Yamaha 5.1 system from 2003 that sounds pretty darn good when I play movies with big soundsacpes, like The Lord of the Rings. Will that receiver ever be able to play HD audio? And finally, should I have started a new thread with the title "What do you listen to movies on"?

hometheater wrote:

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So the ideal way is to have a surround sound receiver (or pre-amp) with multiple HDMI inputs and have it switch between your sources (both audio and video) then a single HDMI out to the TV.

I never thought of routing the video signal through the sound system. That makes more sense to me than routing the audio signal through the TV. I also use my surround for everything. When the input data is only stereo, I set the program mode on the receiver to something it calls "5 channel Stereo." I'm not sure just what processing it does (maybe it just replicates channels), but you get sound on all speakers. When the audio source is 5.1 or 6.1, I set the program mode to "Normal," which doesn't mess with the audio signal at all (other than amplifying it) so I get the multiple channels as intended.

I have tried the "Dolby Pro Logic II" setting (although I honestly don't remember if there was a separate "MUSIC" and "MOVIE" version of the Pro Logic). I liked the "5 channel stereo" setting better because it seemed to fill the room with sound more effectively than the Pro Logic setting.

OK, but don't those movies have Dolby Digital 5.1 on the disc? As I have said, I only use the "5 channel" mode when the input is stereo only. If you have a 5.1 channel input, then there is no need to use Pro Logic to create the other channels, and in fact I believe that using any kind of "effects" processing on a 5.1 (or 6.1 or more) source will mess up the intended experience. When I watch Star Wars, I set the mode to "Normal", which plays the various channels as they are encoded. This way you get the cool sound environment like you are talking about. Another favorite of mine is the scene at the beginning of Back to the Future when the car races towards Doc and Marty and disappears just before it hits them. You hear the car move from the front of your living room to the back.

When your source is only the two stereo channels, you won't get the directionality and movement of real surround however you process them, because there is no way that the Pro Logic processing knows, for example, that a car is moving toward the viewer based only on the stereo inputs. It can do left-to-right stuff, but that is already encoded in the stereo channels and is not lost in the "5 channel" mode.