Emergency Entertainment Alert!!!

We have a serious evening's entertainment on hand, and it is serious danger of being COMPROMISED! Given the vast volume (read: amount) of cash that has been spent on the hardware, it would be really great if we could set things up to work properly to allow the kids (read: Dads) really enjoy the "Attack of the Clones" (yeh, alright, it's nostalgial evening).

We have a Sony Widescreen Trinitron model 32FX65U PAL TV with a Sony DVAS-880 DVD player (this is the 990 model in the States) plugged into into SCART 2 on the TV using S-Video mode. What we see is that we get serious display artefacts around the borders of high contrast areas when there is rapid movement.

I remember the recent thread on clashing Image processors on Sony devices, I wonder if this is related? Anyone got any ideas?

There is a serious amount of free beer on account for the guy (or gal, of course who comes up with the answer before we get seriously pissed in the next couple of hours, to be collected at the next Amersfoort owner's meet (in July? Who knows )

Can you describe the artifacts, sir?

Couple of possibilities:

- The DVD sucks (overcompressed)?

- Is the DVD player a progressive-scan model? Just for the heck of it, try turning off its progressive scan mode.

Wait, scratch that last one. You said s-video. One needs component cables to do prog-scan.

Yeah, describe the artifacts in more detail...

We turned off progressive scan since we are using a SCART with no component cables. No flies on you, sir, I am not worthy!!

The artifacts - if a character has lots of hair (high frequency stuff) then when they move, the area covered by hair looks like "Stars and Stripes" (No dis) until the movement stops. We are seeing this especially on a new "Farscape" 4:3 boxed set, second series. On 16:9 movies (e.g. the start of Star Wars) we see lots of aliasing around hig contrast areas, lettering, silhouettes, etc. Any help?

Merry Christmas sir - what about your wife and kids?

Bad DVD player, maybe? Can't imagine the TV being part of it.

I'm not entirely clear what SCART does and doesn't have in it, but I believe it's still an interlaced signal. So, that means you're not having weird deinterlacing problems like I experienced. What you're seeing is, most likely, the result of bit-rot on the input to the MPEG decoder. High frequency stuff is where most of the bits go, so if you see errors there, that's exactly where bit rot would strike. You tend to see this effect on digital satellite more than on DVDs.

Possible failure modes that could be causing this:

- scratched DVDs
- bad focus / alignment of the DVD's laser pickup

To verify this, find somebody else's DVD player, replace your own, and see if the problem goes away.