How to Install a Home Theater - The DVD Player
Hi, I’m Keith Harmon with Smart Wired Home and we’re back to talk about selecting a DVD player. So when we look at DVD players, one of the major decisions you’re gonna make is do you want a single loader or do you want a multi loader? Here’s one where you can actually load 5 or 6 DVDs into, which is nice if you wanna watch several movies in a row. But that does have some advantages over that, this particular one has the loading of the disc similar what you’ve seen in a car where it pulls the disc in as opposed to having a tray like we see on this one. It’s just a matter of preference. Now when we start talking about DVDs, we also see the format wars that are going on now. Sony has their blu-ray and Toshiba and others have their HD DVD. These are the higher resolution. All our DVDs come out in any of your standard DVDs you buy today contain 480 line of resolution on them interlaced, they’re at 480i. The newer ones come out with the HD DVD that comes out 1080i or the blu-ray comes out at 1080p. Which one do you buy? Well, you know, progressive should be a little better but then again the betamax was supposed to be better than VHS too. If you do wanna do hop into that arena, then you can get one of those, it will give you some high resolution and that’s gonna really start to look at what kind of applets you have on the back. So when we look at what on the back, the all digital signal is the HDMI and we’ll also look at these from the cable’s standpoint, so we’ll see this there. And you wanna have either HDMI or a component, red, green, blue, that will give you and either one of those will carry a high definition video signal and HDMI will also carry the digital audio signal. When you start to look at the, if you use a component then you’re also gonna have to have another cable to carry your audio. You’ve got your old school here, the red and white, right and left stereo signals, not particular what you wanna have or for the DVDs, you don’t get surround sound. What you want for that surround sound is either this coaxial, this one’s black, a lot of times they will be orange in color or this digital optical. And that either, they’re gonna send the same signals, a digital audio signal that is a received on the other side by your receiver which we’re gonna talk about in a different section. It’s just a question of whether it’s sent over a copper wire in this instance or sent over an optical cable in this instance. So it sends its flashes of lights that the signal is coming over. The last one that we, is the old school here is the S-Video, that one we probably won't be using much for any of your HD, that will send out a standard definition signal up to 480. So for the most part we won't use that one or this old component video here, the same thing, old style. That would be the lowest quality video but if you want your lowest quality video, use your component. So that’s a quick overview of some of the things to look for in a DVD player. You’re going to make sure that you have a high definition out of component or HDMI as well as the optical audio outs.