I recently purchased a LCD TV. When I connected the USB drive to see some movies I have in my repository...to my horror found all movies appear like TV shows. animated movies seem like old computer games (like mario) and movie dodgeball looks like a commercial for some cheap fat burner ("As seen on TV" type of Ads)...

All the movies look like they have been shot in the same studio as "Bold and Beautiful"... I dont know waht is the problem... cant even understand if it is the refresh rate or if it is the sharpness of the image... something seems horribly bad... movies dont look like movies any more... ben hur looks like home video...

I haven't tried connecting my laptop to the TV directly... dunno how that will turn out...

Can someone help me? many thanks

- Amu

My first instinct would be to check the movies play OK on the laptop screen. Then you know the files themselves are not somehow corrupt.

Then you could play the files via the laptop using the TV as a second monitor. Probably not exactly how you want to do it, but the end result might work.

As to why they don't look right as it is now - it might be that you need to re-encode the files to play them off your USB drive. Depends on what file types they are, how they were originally encoded, what kind of drive you're plugging into your TV, what the interface with the TV is etc. Need more details to be more specific.

What quality are the movie files? How many MB or GB per file? They may not be great quality rips.

Ahem.. you mean "backups" of his original Dvd's right??

Actually, I have noticed this as well... more so at my mates, there all movies and shows look like "home-made"... It takes some relaxing to go back to enjoy the movie thereafter and is only irritating at the beginning... it goes better after a while...

Same goes for Blue-rays though, so I do not believe the ripping/safecopy is the issue.

TV manufacturers have introduced motion interpolation for more fluid motion but this has its downsides as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation

"Artificial look (Negative) The "video" look side effect is also commonly referred to as "Soap Opera Effect" after the way those shows looked, having been shot on cheaper 30Hz video instead of regular broadcast equipment or film."

Possibly your TV has some setting to disable motion interpolation.