The MY-HD 130 HDTV card ($250.00) will handle 720P & 1080i to perfection (25 meg bitrate) and transmitt it out in 1920 x 1080 and also about 10 other formats including PAL. Just change the file ending from m2t to tp. If you send your Z1 1440 stuff down to an HDTV at 1920 the quality is outstanding. I suppose there are some other video cards out that will do the same.
JJK

The best player I have used that plays "everything" is VLC Media Player.

And it is free besides.

John

You just need to be very careful using ANY player (including VLC) if you're using it to evaluate technical quality. A few have gotten themselves into a lather elsewhere over the new Sony V1U and V1E/P camcorder when it looks like there wasn't anything wrong with the camera (after the firmware was updated), the problem was in the player not displaying the footage correctly.

I'd add display devices themselves to the list of things to be wary of.
The V1 isn't the first camera to suffer this issue, from memory a lot of negative comments were being made about the HVX 200 and noise levels when it was the scalers in the displays making things look worse than they already were.

I'd even add Vegas to the list of problematic display devices, the internal preview is attrocious at displaying PAL at native PAR without introducing horrid aliasing, I'd accused lots of things in Vegas of being substandard when all that was wrong was how Vegas displayed them.

Of course if you just want to see what you shot, ignore all of the above, almost invariably your footage is better than what it looks, so few devices display HDV in all its glory.

Bob.

Joran, I just tried Zoom. I like the clean interface but...

- It would not play M2T files or HD uncompressed AVI. Maybe this is a Pro feature?

- I couldn't get it to open full screen and play the video at 100% by default. It always opens in a tiny window no matter what settings I chose. In fact, I could not find any option to play at 100%.

- I found the play back to be real saturated (like Nero) and glitchy around the edges especially when dragging the size of the window (which is necessary to resize)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see using this player as my default. On to VLC Player which I should already have installed from a while ago...

Thanks for the inputs.

Not to mention that VLC doesn't support 24pGOP files at this time.
I wish more people were aware of the points you make, Bob. There is a thread on DVInfo.net where a guy keeps swearing about marching ants...50+ posts later, he realizes it's the scaler in his display, not his camcorder.

That's THE thread, you'll find me there under another alias, "Bob Grant".

Bob Grant.

Just revisited VLC and remember why I didn't set it up as my default player. IMO it seems overly complicated just to open a file. I was always opening entire directories of files into the player. And VLC has that annoying habit of trying to open shortcut icons instead of following the path. So in order to find the file I want to open I have to start at the root of hard drive and dig down to the directory I want.

But I will say that I like the way it handles M2T files so I've assigned that filetype to VLC. I only use it for showing clips, never for "real" monitoring... not that I do that anyway. Thanks!

Hi
There is a player called Elecard MPEG Player which I prefer to VLC Player. It is not free but not expensive either.
It has the ability to crop files, albeit not very accurately, and other useful features as well.
Malcolm

Jim

* To view video in Full screen mode: Alt+Enter or Right Click and choose Full screen (ON/OFF). Or click the “crossed arrows” on the top right in the player window (Not the Exit X). (Or choose Maximize Window).

* The possibilities to configure ZoomPlayer are almost endless. Open Options (right click) and choose Switch to Advanced Mode.

* To open ZoomPlayer in Full screen mode: Check “Remember Window State on exit (Full screen / width / height)” under Interface.

* Right click in the Media Vindow to change Aspect ratio. Under Control-Colour control you can change the colour settings for playback.

* Down to the left there is a dotted O. Click it to get access to the Top Bar with short cuts to for example the Colour control.

* I do not play m2t files myself. But take at look at the format page: http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/formats/

Experiment and you will see that ZoomPlayer is a very good multimedia player.

Jøran Toresen
Norway

I've been able to play m2t files perfectly in WMP ever since I installednVidia PureVideo. This seems sort of strange since I am using an ATI rather than nVidia graphics card,but hey, whatever works! This is on a P4 3.06 that didn't even come close to handling HDV m2t files before. Now it plays them back perfectly deinterlaced with around 50% CPU usage.