An early Christmas gift from my father arrived yesterday in the form of a Samsung Blu-ray drive for my PC. Since it came with PowerDVD 9, I was able to try out some HD movies on the system for the first time. TRON: Legacy is an exceptional visual experience, so I fired it up in the drive.
What a fantastic looking film it is in HD! While my monitor only goes up to 1680 x 1050 and is exactly between 720p and 1080p, it looked great. Just one problem. No way to do screen captures from PowerDVD and DRM prevents my usual utilities from working correctly. All I get is a black rectangle where the picture is.
Well, being the industrious and stubborn sort I looked for a way around this. While I eventually found one that didn’t cost money (for the moment), it is not the best solution because it involves backing the movie up as an MKV file. Some detail is lost on TRON: Legacy to my eye, but it seemed to do fine with Gammera: Attack of the Legion.
Click on the following for HD sized (1280 pixels wide):
The Disney logo looks sharp here.
Not as satisfied here, but scaling issues may be at work. Oh for a a 1080p monitor!
The film looks grainy, but is miles better than I expected. HD is fun for examining the model buildings that are always destroyed in these films.
It is very silly that screen captures are not allowed. Do the studios really think we will sit and takes stills of every frame to recreate the movies?
I probably will upgrade the PowerDVD software but I am still looking for a better way to do screen captures. AnyDVD is what a lot of people use, but the price of 80 Euros is exorbitant! MakeMKV did an odd job with TRON and there are waves of block distortions going through every scene. Perhaps the DRM is the culprit.
So my first step into the HD world has been taken and I am liking it, despite the screen capturing issues.
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