Info and forum posts by 'Barney Gwyther'

Joined on: Friday, 26th November 1999, 16:57, Last used: Friday, 26th November 1999, 16:57

Access Level: Harmless

About this user: I`m a 22 year old male young professional working in the computing industry.
I`m relatively new to the phenomona that is DVD, and am starting to put together a half decent collection of movies. My taste is fairly wide I guess.
I watch my movies on my tossey PC but have a mate with a proper home cinema setup so normally watch them on that to get an idea of how they `should` look and sound ;)

This user has posted a total of 5 messages. On average, since joining, this user has posted 0 messages a day, or 0 messages a week. In the last 30 days, this user has posted 0 messages, which is on average 0 messages a day.

Recent Messages Posted:

RE: Pioneer DVD 626D? Anybody know about it?

Hi again. Glad I could be of help.

In answer to your questions:

1. The sound runs fine without an amp. I currently just have the sound going into my TV and playing out through that. Think of it like a video recorder - one cable squirting all the picture and sound into the TV. Of course you don`t get any kind of surround effects but so long as your TV is capable of half decent sound, its okey.

2. Yes mine is multi-region. I bought it from Techtronics, (http://www.techtronics.com/), specifically because they are able to alter the machine in such a way that allows it to play discs from any region. You can read all about the process on their page.

3. I`ve succesfully played regular audio CD`s, CDR`s with audio tracks and CDRW`s with audio tracks. I assume that VCD`s on CDR`s and CDRW`s would also work, but haven`t tried yet. The player isn`t capable of MP3 playback.

Again, hope that helps,

Cheers.

Barney Gwyther

RE: Pioneer DVD 626D? Anybody know about it?

Hi Chris,

I bought a Pioneer DV-626D player from Techtronics, (http://www.techtronics.com/) last month. I`m incredibly impressed with both the service Techtronics provided and the player as well.

It arrived at my door 4 days after I placed my order, plays every movie I`ve thrown at it, outputs excellent picture and includes both DTS and Dolby Digital decoders (how useful this is if you`re going to end up buying a `proper` home cinema AV Amp I`m not too sure).

Home Cinema Choice gave the player a rave review as well, (check http://www.homecinemachoice.com/testbench/DVDPlayers/Pioneer/PioneerDV-626D.shtml).

My only question would be do you need the luxury of built in DTS and Dolby Digital decoding? If its either your intention not to go the whole hog, (ie: you`re happy with the sound coming from your TV), or you want a seperate amplifier to do your sound decodoing for you - then the extra you pay for a 626D is probably wasted.

Hope that helps, and if I can help further let me know,

Cheers

Barney Gwyther

PC based DVD and TV-Out

Excuse me venting my spleen here but I had to share the experiences I`ve had over the past couple of days:

I admit it - my homecinema setup is crap. I have a 5 year old 14" portable telly, a 3 year old plays-ok-but-doesn`t-record-anymore VCR and, well thats about it. I do however have a reasonably high spec PC with a DVD player. For the past year I have suffered watching my movies on my PC and accompanying 17" monitor - hardly ideal.

I finally capitulated last weekend and splashed out on a `proper` TV and DVD player, (a 28" Loewe Xelos from http://www.empiredirect.co.uk and a Pioneer DV-626D from http://www.techtronics.com/). The TV arrived on Wednesday, so being the impatient git that I am I had to try and get the PC to play my movies on the big screen.

My PC runs Windows 98 and I have a Creative Labs 3D Blaster, which is an NVIDIA TNT-2 Ultra based graphics card. I picked up an S-VHS lead and slapped it in between the PC and TV, picked the channel and... nothing. A quick download to grab Creatives graphics driver, (I had NVIDIAS reference driver installed), a reboot, and I tried again... and nothing. I resorted to reading the help, (what a wuss eh?), and was presented with screenshots and diagrams explaining exactly what buttons to press to bring up the `TV Out` options page... unfortunately said buttons weren`t present. Apparently the driver I had installed and the help file I was reading didn`t match (thank you Creative!).

A quick web search showed other people were having similar problems and had found the individual registry key entries that needed tweaking in order to enable TV Out. One registry backup, twenty odd minutes of hacking the registry and two reboots and I was ready to try again... and... it worked! I could see my PC desktop (albeit in a rather feeble 800x600 resolution), on my TV. Home and dry, I`ll just slap a movie on, kick back relax and enjoy... or so I thought.

You see this is where the dreaded MacroVision kicked in. Apparently I was attempting to output an un-encoded signal that could have been recorded onto video, which isn`t allowed. Instead I got a big yellow "YOU CAN`T WATCH THIS" screen.

Back to the drawing board, or the search engines to be precise. A quick search for "TNT2 TV out macrovision disable" returned an interesting sounding result:

"Q: I`ve got a TNT2 Ultra with s-video out - when I try to play a DVD through my TV the player`s window only contains the words "Macrovision 1, Macrovision 2, Macrovision 3" (playing on my monitor works fine).
A: This can be fixed with TVTool from http://come.to/tvout ..."

It sounds like just what I want. So I pop across to its homepage - and its in German. Thankfully `Download` seems to mean the same in German as it does in English so a quick download, unzip, install and reboot later, I`m ready to try again. I fire up TVTool select what look like being the right options, (including ticking the `Disable Macrovision` box), and give it a go. Lo and behold - DVD movies playing from my PC on my TV! Woo-hoo! Its gone two in the morning now so I crawl into bed content in the knowledge I can watch my movies in full on 28" widescreen loveliness.

Of course the next day my Pioneer DVD player arrived so I will probably never use my new-found PC DVD playing capabilites again... still, its nice to know that I can :-)

Monkey!

Oh my, what a joyus day! I`ve just heard that legendary cult TV series `Monkey!` is available - alas only on VHS, but promising news regarding a potential DVD release on one of the many Monkey fan sites:

"There is no immediate plan to release the series on DVD, although Fabulous Films are interested in possibly doing this sometime in the future. However, to do this requires a completely separate deal to be made with NTV. So for the moment, they`re concentrating on the video release."

/me crosses fingers hopefully.

Barney Gwyther

Editing reviews after posting

Hiya,

First off I`d better say how top notch DVD Reviewer is. It seems like every ten minutes at work I have fire up my browser and check the news and reviews (sad I know).

Anyway, I just got round to adding a couple of reviews (see if you can read all the way through without laughing at my hideously poor grammar, punctuation, and, er general lack of English writing skill). Anyway, I wondered if there is or will be, a way of editing a review once its been posted? I`m sure I`m not the only one who has posted a review then read back through it only to spot some glaring error staring me in the face.

Alternatively I could shut up and just be more careful when I post my reviews - or maybe I could get my mum to come and proof read them before submission? :-)

Cheers

Barney