I’m sharing my personal tips on watching DVD at home with a HDTV. Make sure you have a nice TV at home and a home theater system to maximize your movie watching pleasure.
Use component cable to connect to your TV from your DVD player instead of the composite or S-Video. You can identify component cable as it has 3 colours (red, blue, green) for video output and composite or S-Video is those single yellow cable. With component cable, you can watch your video up to 1080p if you have a DVD upscaler or at least at a progressive scan of 480. The best is with HDMI, but at the moment, the most common DVD player has component output.
Set your audio out put to DTS if you have a digital output connect to your home theater system. Personally, I think DTS provide better, louder and clearer surround sound quality than Dolby 5.1. I haven’t got a chance to try with 7.1 DTS-EX / DTS-HD / Dolby TrueHD as they are quite new.
Remember to run through your DVD player set up and set your display output as 16:9 Widescreen for you HDTV. If not, it will remain as normal 4:3 letterbox and with 16:9, your DVD will looks perfect on your TV and there will be a little letterbox for some DVD but that’s normal.
Set your DVD player to Progressive Scan mode if you have that feature. Only with component/HDMI output get to receive Progressive Scan pictures. It’s of course clearer and sharper.
Have your remote control around so you can control the volume when mom is shouting at you.
Turn on the subtitle, it will help you on understanding the movie more as some part will be quite soft and you wouldn’t want to crank your volume to the max just for that particular scene.
Lastly, lie on a bed or sit of a comfort couch of your home. Get rid of distraction and concentrate on your movie.
So that’s my tips on watching a DVD at home. I love to watch movies, so I always buy DVDs to watch if I’ve miss it in the cinema. Enjoy.
There is no HD Channel in Malaysia yet! Not even on Pay-TV like Astro, Fine TV and Streamyx IPTV. You guys suck! Seriously, High Definition TV or HDTV’s price has been drop. Just a few K and you can get a HDTV for yourself. It’s cheaper than a projection TV last time.
My house recently just convert all analogue CRT or “Box” TV into LCD TV. No more thick and square TV already. Living room’s projection TV went dead again. Dad doesn’t want to repair and so got a new LCD TV. But it sucks watching the local Satallite TV Astro on it. The people in a widescreen 16:9 TV look like fatass. I’ve rather have 2 little bar beside the screen to get a 4:3 than watching some fatass on the TV. It seriously looks ugly. Maybe a little zoom in will look good, but it maybe pixalate since it’s playing on 480i.
Got me? Even without HD resolution, the Astro (Malaysia pay TV) set top box doesn’t even has a component output, only S-Video and Composite. Boo.
When will HD Channel come to Malaysia? I heard that there’s trial for HD channel in Klang Valley last year, but nothing much has been said on the newspaper. People in Singapore, Hong Kong has already enjoying HD quality video on their TV while we still watching squared, stereo sound quality movies on our TV.
So far, the HDTV at home is used for downloaded movies on the computer, web browsing in my room and DVD playing in the living room. I need a PlayStation 3 to play Blu-Ray. Hahas. But I got no money.
By the way, is it HD is not so high demand for Malaysian? I think there’s still many TV noobs out there. The ministry of ICT must do something already to promote HD.
People keep saying support original, buy original CD, DVD, software and blablabla. Now, it’s time for me to make use of the Internet, I want to buy a song (New Soul – Yael Naim) in iTunes Music Store, the world largest online music store also cannot. It’s because iTunes doesn’t support Asia country yet except Japan.
Although I had an iTunes Music Store account and PayPal and also credit card too! But They need everything to be in US address. I got a fake address for my iTunes account but not for my credit card and PayPal.
Now the last chance is to buy a iTunes Gift Card from the local store, though I don’t want to touch my cash. I use only my virtual money for Internet usage. Sigh, I hope iTunes Music Store support international music buyers very soon. =)
iTunes Music Store is the only place I can find the song New Soul by Yael Naim, not even Amazon and WalMart can find it. They sucks.
By the way, the song I’m looking for is the song used in the MacBook Air ad. Hehe.
Do you want to be the next James Bond? Call your mate with your watch. LOL. People will think you are crazy when you are talking to your watch but it maybe real. The Chinese is real genius in creating these watch phone. Many years ago I read about Samsung was planing a watch phone but I never heard about it until now.
Though, the M800 isn’t a fake. I was first came across it at Docfiles and was feeling excited about it for the first time because the main factor of the plus point for this watch phone is the price, it’s only RM550 and around US$170 if you look for it in eBay.
Since it’s a watch, I can wear it to school and disguise as a normal Casio watch. In Malaysia, student can’t bring cell phone to school which really sucks. When we want to inform our parents something, or the time the school dismisses, we have to use the crappy public pay phone. I would update my Twitter in school if I wear this watch phone to school.
This watch phone has very simple yet cool phone feature :
1.3″ Touch Screen
Handwriting recognition
MP3 and MP4 playback.
GSM/GPRS
128mb build in memory which can also serve as a mass storage
Bluetooth
Come with a Bluetooth Headset too.
MMS/SMS
Speaker phone/handsfree
Pretty cool right? I got to say that geeks or gadget lovers should have this in your collection. As for me, I haven’t make up my mind to buy or not to buy yet. I got many gadget in my wishlist. If I got the money, I’ll definitely get this already, as a toy, phone or whatever. =)
Staying up late tonight to catch Steve Jobs’ Keynote at MacWorld 2008. I hope I get a chance to go to MacWorld some day in the future, if there’s sponsor, it will be great! I took a short nap in the afternoon, so I can stay up late right now. The keynote starts at 1am Malaysia Time and will probably end at 3am. Holy crap, I think I am going to fell asleep in class tomorrow.
Sites that are providing live keynote of MacWorld that are running in the background right now are :
I have to keep pressing F5 on some sites to refres. Haha. Anyway, I am hoping for new iPhone to be announce, and of course a new line of MacBooks series. Thiner, slimer and touch screen will be cool!
