DV player where art thou ?
 

Am I missing something here?
Was looking everywhere, DVD players, HDD players, streaming devices, why is it that a format , which everybody has a ton around the whole world cannot be played back ? Are they afraid that DV format (shot by a solid camcorder, in good manners) to be seen on HDTV would not look that bad ?

PS3 now plays back DivX ! So anybody who gathers rips from DVDs is better off then somebody who was just in DV business or was just making home videos. I think there is going to be a difference to watch DV avi on HD screen 1980x1080, than 3 times compressed mpeg2 , that is on DVD. Anybody has any experience on this?

There is solution to go with HTPC or just have a PC in a living room, but that means to have a PC for that (not inexpensive, noisy, start-up issues...).

My thought exactly.

I'm having difficulty surmising the focus of the post.

-Jon

I do not have any experience on this

I think the original poster is talking about a miniDV deck?

Like this:

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/...52921665093001

I've always thought there should be an affordable miniDV/HDV tape player like this:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...eplacementLink

But at that price, buying a Canon HV20 camcorder and using it as playback deck would be a better option, connected permanently to your HDTV.

If you want to watch DV AVI files on a big TV then send the files via FireWire to your camcorder and connect the analog outputs to your TV. This puts no wear and tear on the camcorder since it is merely acting as a DV to S-video converter.

My thought is to play back DV avi files through HDD or any storage device or DVD player, HD DVD player and to be seen on HDTV.
Tapes are excellent for archiving but not good in this century to be in a media library in the living room.

It would be interesting to know how DV avi looks like on HDTV full HD especially compared with DVD's (CBR 8000) that were made from the same DV avi. By DV avi I mean well made DV, recorded at least by semi-profi camcorder, not some cheap DV camcorder, in which case it would not make any sense to see the result on HDTV, it looks bad on CRT as it is :).

Al,

DV can be stored either on DV tape, or on a computer hard drive. If it's on tape, connect your camcorder or your DV deck to the TV either via firewire (yes, some TVs have firewire inputs!) or via component (all decent TVs have that nowadays). If DV sits on a hard drive, well, hard drives are computer components, so use a computer to play them back - modern TVs have inputs to accomodate computers.

As far as burning DV as data to a DVD, what's the point? If you want a DVD, then author a DVD - with good mpeg2 compressors you can't tell the difference; I am telling you this from experience - I use CinemaCraft, it is visually perfect even at 6 Mbps when compressing with multiple pass (8-10 passes).

And this answers your other question, there is no visual difference on my full HD (I guess that's what you are referring to, a 1920x1080 Mitsu LCD flat panel) driven via HDMI by my standard def Philips DVD player/burner that happens to have firewire in as well.

What you've been missing until now is this awesome forum - you found it now...

Welcome to DVinfo!