Making DVDs look better

Is there any way that I can make my DVDs look better? I was watching the lord of the rings and i was very dissapointed to see all that noise on the screen. It was really annoying. I have a high res screen 1280x1024, and for all i know that might be the problem.

Watch from further back. Its what I did when I had a 17" CRT.

Changing the resolution of your screen does nothing for a DVD seeing as they're 720x480 max(well, 4:3, I don't know what the 16:9 resolution is right off) So no, there's nothing you can do to make them look better. Well, other than watching them from farther back as suggested

thanks for the help. i cant wait until the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray come out. YAY for high def content!

I don't understand why people don't have that stuff now. I don't know what compression they plan to use, but if movies were compressed using DIVX or similar MEPG4 methods, you could fit rather high quality videos on a DVD...perhaps at or around the resolutions of HD-TVs...

Are you talking about noise or just graininess? There shouldn't really be any noise but there will be a limit to how good of resolution you can get (720 X 480 as The_Other_One mentioned, and that is for 4:3 and 16:9 btw). There is a method called upsampling that is similar to deinterlacing a TV signal that essentially makes the DVD act as if it were high resolution by interpolating the lines and basically doubling them. I'm not too familiar with how widespread it is; for all I know it may be used in all software DVD players.

I meant graininess, my bad.