I own several players, some for daily use, others for special occasions or if one of the others might kick te bucket for some reason. One of those daily players is an "Encore DVD-43031", and sits in my bedroom, as I like to watch a movie or anime now and then before I go to sleep.
I connected it through a VGA-box to a computer monitor I had lying around, but I wasn't very satisfied with the picture quality. The conversion from composite to VGA made the image very bright, but toying with the brightness and the settings of the VGA-box didn't do much good.
The VGA-box also has S-video and YUV-connections, so I thought I'd try a YUV->VGA conversion.
The image improved a little, but still quite bright and saturated, so I checked the setup of the player for more options.
"Hm, let's see what we have here... Video, S-Video, RGB, PC-VGA, YUV... Hold on, PC-VGA? That would be nice; let's fire up the soldering iron!"
Okay, technically it's not really a hack, since it's already built into the firmware, but not everyone is very keen on drilling holes in their DVD-player. ;)
It's quite logical actually, as most cheap DVD-players tend to be built around a PC-type DVD-pickup, and driven by a small MPEG-decoder with everything but the kitchen sink built in.
The PCB had an unconnected connector with R, G, B, H-sync and V-sync next to it, so I removed the SCART-connector (who needs that when the player already has connections for Composite, S-video and YPbPr), drilled some extra holes and mounted a VGA-connector instead, using the wires that used to lead to the SCART-PCB.
Hooked it up to the monitor without the VGA-box, and presto; a stable image without being too bright or saturated.
Here are some pictures I took during the build.For sound, you get 5.1 analog outputs and both TosLink and S/P-DIF digital outputs on this puppy, so that was good to begin with.
Now, if you'll excuse me; I have NieA under 7 to finish.
Cheers, K.