Hi all,

I'm hoping some kind person can help me out. I am having two problems:

1. I am trying to get sound through my (approx 4 years old) Panasonic DVD home cinema system but nothing is coming out. The blu ray has a digital coax connection while the home cinema has an optical connection so I have a small converter box in the middle (it had good reviews so I'm hoping that's not the problem). I have my home cinema set to D-in so it should be recognising the blu ray player. I have tried playing around with the settings on the blu ray player but nothing seems to makes any difference.

2. The DVD I am playing is an old 1980s one and it hasn't upscaled the picture whatsoever which is very disappointing. Is this because the DVD is too old?

I am thinking of replacing the DVD player in the home cinema with an AV receiver which might solve problem 1 but I'm not sure it's worth it if the blu ray player won't upscale.

Thanks in anticipation,

Denise

Model numbers of Blu-Ray and home cinema system would help.

Define not upscaling? A DVD is about a quarter of the resolution of HD. Assuming you have a full HD TV then if there were no upscaling at all the image from the DVD would appear as a small box in the middle of the screen with thick black borders all round.

Even if the Blu-Ray player did not upscale the DVD (which is perfectly feasible) the TV should. So what exactly are you seeing? Age of the disk is irrelevant.

Thanks for responding

The blu ray player is a Sony BDPS390
The home cinema is a Panasonic SC-PT850 (5.1)
The HDTV is a Samsung UE40C5800QK

I deliberately chose this particular DVD because it had a poor picture on the DVD player (due to its age I guess - not that I've owned it since the 80s but that's when it was filmed). When I say it is not upscaling, I mean I put it in the DVD player first then in the blu ray player and could detect no difference in picture quality at all.

I think I know why the sound isn't working and it's rather embarrassing. I guess middle-aged women and technology don't mix (even if I am a systems analyst - lol!)

If you have a HD TV then the TV would be upscaling from the DVD player in the home cinema system. When you play it in the Blu-Ray either it or the TV could be doing the upscaling, depending on the settings of the player.

Basically if the image from the DVD isn't a small box in the middle of the screen then it is being upscaled. Upscalling cannot create any more detail in the source image. That is why it makes no real difference which player you use. Unless the TV has a particularly crap upscaler and the Sony is far superior (or vice versa) you won't notice any difference. All upscaling is doing is inventing extra pixels to fit between the ones present in the original so that the image fills the screen.

Playing the same disk on a DVD or Blu-Ray won't change the number of pixels in the image. The only way you would do that is go out and buy the Blu-Ray version of the film and hope it's a proper new transfer from the original film not the DVD version upscaled!

And dare one assume the sound is now working? Being a gent I won't ask a lady what she cocked up.

Thanks for the explanation.

No the sound isn't working yet as I have to buy a different converter. I have decided to post my mistake in case it helps someone else. I need a coax to optical converter but the one I have is the other way around

Upscaling doesn't make an SD picture in to HD (although the way advertisers use the term makes people think it does) it simply makes the picture fill the screen.

The crucial point is how good the different scalers are (the one in your TV upscales your DVD player, and the one in the BD player upscales DVD's in the BD player). Usually the ones in BD players (and particularly Sony BD players) are better than the ones in TV's, even Sony TV's which are one of the best.

However, if your DVD is really poor quality it's not going to improve the quality of it at all, only make a better job of scaling it.