Enter your screen size and some content will have automatically adjust the 3D depth. The player will detect 3D on your TV, use it, as running 3D on a 2D TV will often cause a blank image. This is a Panasonic setting, and while it fixes one problem, it introduces a larger one, and should remain off.ģD Output Setting: Auto. Only the Normal/Standard mode will let your Blu-ray player produce a correct image.Īdvanced Chroma: Off. Modes like Movie, Drama, Sports and so on lead to incorrect images from your player, and those adjustments should be made in the TV instead. Many times you can only access this with the options pop-up while watching a film, and not in the normal setup menus. This called many different things on players, and is often separate from the other controls.
Older receivers can’t process bitstreams and need PCM, but they will tell the Blu-ray player this, so Auto is the way to go. This is a more controversial setting, but no Blu-ray content uses Deep Color, and most displays aren’t designed to properly use it, or can’t display it, so shutting it off avoids possible problems, and under the current standard it has no benefit.Īudio (HDMI): Auto. Some TVs and other components, like receivers, will do extra conversions on the signal from your Blu-ray player that make a choice besides 4:2:2 correct, but without test patterns like those on Spears and Munsil, it is really impossible to determine this. Likely they all will look identical, but some displays or Blu-ray players really work best with one. If you want to know for certain, you now can purchase the Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark and Calibration Disc 2nd Edition ($29.97), which has special test patterns to help you determine the correct choice. If you don’t know, 4:2:2 or Auto is the best choice. Usually a player can do this without issue. Basically, all Blu-ray content is stored as YCbCr 4:2:0, but HDMI can’t use that format, so it has to be converted to YCbCr 4:2:2, 4:4:4 or RGB first by the player. Colorspace is a very confusing thing that thousands of words can be written on. If it doesn’t support it, it will default back to 60p or 60i. If your display supports 24p content, which most do now, it will send that out to it, as films are 24p. Shop Amazon – The Hottest Electronics Gifts for 2014īest Selling Soundbars and 5.1 Surround SystemsĢ4p Output: Auto. Unless you own an expensive video processor, don’t do this as your Blu-ray player probably has better video processing than your TV or receiver. Some have an option called “Original Resolution” or “Source Direct”, which outputs the content at the original resolution and not the ideal resolution for your TV. This will detect the resolution of your TV and set the Blu-ray resolution accordingly. Typically only concerts and some TV shows are interlaced on Blu-ray, but leave it on Auto. This mode detects if you’re watching a film or video that happens to interlaced and deinterlaces it. Otherwise it will crop the sides of the image if you happen to use an SDTV still.Ĭinema Conversion Mode: Auto. You can change it if you’d like, but everyone will look fat.ĭVD Aspect Ratio: Letter Box. Fixed aspect ratio will stretch 4:3 content to fill your HDTV. Unless you’re running this on an SDTV it should be 16:9. Most players will have the same options, though possibly slightly different names.
To go over how to correctly set these up, I’m going to reference a Sony BDP-S570 Blu-ray player and its menu options and how they should be configured.
Making things worse, many manuals explain the options in ways that don’t help, like “Option X: Turns Option X on and off”.
Most players now have guided setups when you first install them, but they either don’t explain most of these features, or don’t even cover them.
The menus are filled with different video and audio options, with very little mentioned in the owner’s manual about them.
Configuring a Blu-ray player is a much harder task than you would think it should be.