Some chipsets fail to upconvert 720p24 properly. My Oppo BDP-93 (Marvell Qdeo 88DE2750 chipset) used to upconvert to 1080p24, but then there was a firmware update to fix a colorspace bug and 720p24 now goes to 1080p60 just like yours. I’m afraid in my case the fix is a new player, since it’s long out of support. What’s more annoying to me is that the 480i NTSC decoding went to crap at the same time too, in a much worse way. So it’s very possible the hardware itself is at fault, but I don’t know your model specifically. If only HDMI supported 720p24, then you could just pass it as-is and let the display handle the upconversion. Argh.
I’m not sure about that. There’s some sort of setting that runs SD DVDs at 24p, but I’m not sure it works. I know my HDMI can handle all the up to 1080/24, since that’s what all of my Blu-rays run. If it can do that, I assume that it can do 720/24p. It seems to do the scaling automatically. Maybe it’s my TV? Even when I plug in my old game consoles, even composite scales up to 1080/60p (or at least it says so).
It’s only morally stealing if you don’t own the Blu rays. I don’t think God would consider it a sin to watch an alternate (unfortunately) version of a movie you have legally purchased and paid the price for. (Not making fun)
I technically don’t own the Blu-rays just the VHS tapes. I used to have the old trilogy set on DVD, but sold it. But yeah, I get what you’re saying, I just hope Uncle Sam would see it that way if the copyright police ever showed up 😉. But listen, I’m the guy who feels bad for loading audiobooks on CD I get from the library into iTunes even though I always delete them immediately after I’m done with them. Maybe it’s a complex 😉.