Do consoles suck as DVD players?

[Mr_Furious]

Do consoles suck as DVD players? YES!

You can get a great stand alone player with all the bells and whistles for hella-cheap anyway.

[Agent X]

Originally posted by PBMaX
My Nuon (Samsung N2000) is my best DVD player. I try to use it as much as possible, but unfortunately it's been put on living room duty.

Same here. It's a really sweet DVD player.

Interestingly enough, my N2000 choked on the Infinifilm features in Blow. I put the disc in my PS2 and the Infinifilm features played flawlessly. I thought it was very ironic, since the special Infinifilm features were pretty much what the special NUON features in NUON-enhanced movies were supposed to be like (or at least what many people hoped they would have been like), but designed in such a way that they would work with almost any ordinary DVD player. Odd that my NUON machine had a problem with it.

Apart from that, though, it has worked really well. I've never experienced any problems with the PS2 as a DVD player, although I've only played about 1/6 of the number of movies in the PS2 that I have played in the NUON. I generally prefer to play DVD movies on the NUON...but I prefer to play games on the PS2.

[sphere79]

Originally posted by burgundy
My PS2 works fine. My Xbox is a testy little bitch.

You've got one of those damn Thompson DVD-ROM Xbox's. Some are OK, some are fussy and others become very problematic.

Originally posted by Hybrid
The Xbox (at least mine) has some serious issues with displaying the color red. It's a launch system so it could have been fixed in the current hardware version, but any scene that has red in it becomes badly pixilated around the edges.

I have noticed the output is bright, the colors do seem to bleed when I play Roger Waters' "In the Flesh" Live DVD - but then they did on my Toshiba DVD player too ( which I gave to my parents after getting the Xbox kit ). All in all I'm quite happy with the Xbox's DVD playback. There's no VCD playback though ( there isn't on PS2 either ) which sucks but I use my Dreamcast ( remember that?! ) for VCD and MP3 playback with excellent results.

Originally posted by kbuchanan
I've actually A-B'd them a bit, and I can tell you that the PS2 DVD image is considerably better than the XBox's.

The quality of the output circuitry may be different, but it's generaly accepted that hardware MPEG2 decoding is prefered to software decoding, like the PS2 uses. I dunno, maybe Sony's improved the algorithm or something but I seem to remember most early PS2 vs. Xbox DVD comparisons almost always favoring Xbox, at least in terms of artifacting.

Originally posted by PBMaX
First of all any Artisan DVD (Pi, Stir of Echoes, Dog Soldiers ...) cannot recover from a pause. I have to reboot, and start over.

My Nuon (Samsung N2000) is my best DVD player. I try to use it as much as possible, but unfortunately it's been put on living room duty.

That's EXACTLY what my first ( Thompson DVD-ROM ) Xbox does. You cannot pause a DVD without it f**king up. I haven't tried the "DVD-ROM tweek" on it yet, but my new Xbox has no problems pausing at all. Ironically, they are either Philips or more likely the Samsung DVD-ROM drive from what I've heard.

Originally posted by Geruto
I was also adviced to not buy a Philips DVD coz they have the same problems and are very bad quality.

You were advised incorrectly my friend! As far as "bang for the buck" is concerned, you'll do well with one of those $120 Philips DVD players from Target, etc. Not only do they have composite-out but they play VCD's, SVCD's, MP3CD's, etc. Philips SHOULD know how to make decent DVD players, being the main patent holder for the format, not to mention cassette, LaserDisc, and CD. Did I mention Philips rocks? All of my Philips stuff ( including the now 10+ year old CD-i ) still functions and I've yet to kill a Philips/Magnavox TV set. Some of the Mag stuff pre-Philips owning them is questionable, but I love the brand so much I made my wife buy a Philips toaster. Don't laugh, we'll probably be handing it down to our kids.......

[bocmaxima]

I hate the PS2 DVD player...I fucking took an hour for it to recognize Dagon without giving a DRE, then played it fine...took another hour to recognize Vulgar, and then fucked up the second half...unfortunately I dont have a standalone...

[youandwhosearmy]

Originally posted by burgundy
My PS2 works fine. My Xbox is a testy little bitch.

Other way around for me.


Xbox has never frozen or locked up on me once, the PS2 I have one of out of every five dvd's I rent won't work.

[GameCynic]

There are a few wack ass DVD's (Akira) that won't play on a PS2 or other obscure DVD systems because they arn't encoded properly. Anything above a small percentile not playing is chalked up to shity hardware.

[Shin Johnpv]

i personally like panasonic dvd players my last one was and it was fucking great till it died on me

need to replace it one dayw ith an other panasonic one

[Mfkzt]

Xbox outputs a stronger color signal than PS2. Turn the color down and it looks fine.

[Ex Ranza]

Originally posted by sphere79
The quality of the output circuitry may be different, but it's generaly accepted that hardware MPEG2 decoding is prefered to software decoding, like the PS2 uses. I dunno, maybe Sony's improved the algorithm or something but I seem to remember most early PS2 vs. Xbox DVD comparisons almost always favoring Xbox, at least in terms of artifacting.

OK, I'm stupid, but I do find this interesting. Can you explain how the PS2 plays DVD's in comparison to the X-Box or a standalone player? What differences are there between software and hardware MPEG encoding?

For the record, I've had good luck with DVD playback on my PS2.. I've only seen artifacting crop up once or twice, on Lord of the Rings. My Toshiba standalone handles it flawlessly, though.

[Drewbacca]

I don't really know. I tend to use my videogame consoles to play videogames.