Problem with HD vids on my new PC!

[mob77]

I recently built a new PC and bought a Gateway FHD2401 24" HD monitor. The monitor has a resolution of 1920x1200 and supports 1080p.

All of the hardware is brand new and fairly powerful (Asus P5Q, E8500 dual core, 2 gigs ram, Radeon 4890 HD) so I don't believe it's a hardware problem.

I haven't yet bought a Blu-Ray reader, but I have a few HD quality blu-ray rips and clips on my PC but whenever I play them they never look like HD quality.

This makes me believe that it's a software problem that I'm having. Am I not playing the files with the right program. To date I've tried VLC, media player classic, and smplayer. I also installed a codec pack called CoreAVC. Alternatively, is there some sort of program I'm supposed to use to convert the files in order to get them to display in HD quality?

The files that I am trying to play are in *.mkv and *.ts formats. Now all of the files will play with one (if not all) of the programs above, but the problem I'm having is that it never looks like true HD quality.

Does anybody have any advice on other things/programs that I should try?

Thanks. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

[shadowpr]

What resolution are you using?

How were those movies encoded? Were they compressed a lot, or was there no compression?

[mob77]

I have the desktop resolution set to 1920x1200 (the highest resolution setting).

I don't think the files are compressed at all. I have three different files. Two are mkv files (one is 720p, the other is 1080p) and the other is a ts file and is supposed to be 1080p (it's about 5 gigs so I assume it is actually 1080p).

[shadowpr]

I wouldn't assume that.

I have regular dvd movies that when ripped are 6gb.

Unless you encoded them yourself I wouldn't assume anything. Best bet if you want 1080 is to get a blu-ray disc and watch it. Then you will know for sure what is going on.