King Kong and LG DS9481

Well, that isn’t the latest kickoff in the King Kong series. And LG DS9481 isnt an adversary to King Kong but is a DVD player from the LG stable.

I have been watching DVDs on my PC for all this while. It was kind of ok, but there were a few issues with that arrangement. First of all, PC DVD player isn’t really all that great.. The PC DVD drive is meant to read data.. and read it nice and proper. With the kind of DVDs we get here, which are scratched big time, the PC DVD drive has a hard time trying to read it all up. It doesn’t have error correction as good as most ‘proper’ DVD players, which would simply skip the next few frames resulting in just a few fuzzy frames and not really a hang.

Then, my PC doesn’t have all that great viewing position. I needed to drag my sofa all the way from the drawing room to another room to get good viewing comfort. It was getting to me a little bit off late.

So, one fine Saturday, I just made up my mind, that we did need a proper DVD player. The choice fell between Philips and LG. It was tough call in the end, with a longish phone call with Kunal finally sealing the fate in favor of LG, though somewhere in my heart I was still pining for Philips, with its much better designed remote control and experience of owning a Philips DVD player back home.

Anyhow I paid for a LG DS 9481. It supposedly plays all the usual formats: DVD, VCD, MP3, JPEG… and also the newer stuff like DivX and MP4. God knows if I will ever really use DivX and MP4 content. That was really the differentiating factor over Philips in terms of features. Time shall tell…

I also bought a 5 meter long Audio cord, so that I could connect the DVD Audio output to my Sony Music Player. Back home, I realize that even ‘5 damn long meters’ is too short to reach anywhere near my Sony System. Paaah.. I tried some other combinations, moving the DVD player closer to the Sony system etc etc.. and it all resembled a Dhobi Ghaat, with wires flying all over the place. Really blew my nerves.. These damn Electronics Manufactures will give you pathetically small lengths of cords.. and then you are all on your own figuring out a configuration to connect it all somehow…

I tried to move my Computer Speakers “Creative 2.1 channel” to connect it with the DVD player, only to realize that these damn things take only a TRS (Headphone) Jack while the DVD player has only RCA jack outputs.. So I realize I need a RCA to TRS converter. I could only manage to find one on Sunday. The final thing, with my 2.1 channel speakers connected to the DVD player is setup, though predictably I cant turn the volume up and down, cause Comp Speakers don’t come with a remote.. J

The first DVD I watch is “King Kong”, to unleash a pure visual movie on my spanking new DVD player system. The overall impact turned out to be pretty average. Not really blaming my system, the DVD was pretty dark and dingy most of the running length. And to be honest the story wasn’t as engaging as I would have liked.

It is very visual movie that must be enjoyable in a movie theatre, but on a 21” TV, it was less impactfull then expected. Naomi Watts hardly looks appealing enough to woo the audience though she certainly does the giant ape in the movie.