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macgeek2005 · Feb 22, 2007, 11:52 PM

I know that Quicktime and DVD player technically "upscale" the video to fit the screen, but is there software that actually upscales the video quality, and turns it into 1080p?

I know there are DVD players that do this. But is there software for computers?

Thanks.

TETENAL · Feb 23, 2007, 12:04 AM

How should that work? Information that is not there on the DVD is not there. When you upscale the image the pixel in-between need to be interpolated, and that's exactly what Apple's DVD Player does.

macgeek2005 · Feb 23, 2007, 03:08 AM

Originally Posted by TETENAL

How should that work? Information that is not there on the DVD is not there. When you upscale the image the pixel in-between need to be interpolated, and that's exactly what Apple's DVD Player does.

Well, how does this do it?

OPPO DV-981HD 1080p Up-Converting Universal DVD Player with HDMI - More Information

RevEvs · Feb 23, 2007, 06:30 AM

When you play a DVD on a computer the video card will upscale the image to whatever resolution you are using.

workerbee · Feb 23, 2007, 07:33 AM

DVDs and even DivX movies don't look too bad viewed full-screen on my 23" Cinema Display (full HD resolution), so I think DVD player and VCD do de-interlacing and upscaling quite nicely; I don't see any need at all for any separate software solution.
Possibly specialized hardware (Faroudja et al) used in DVD players results in better quality, though.

mduell · Feb 23, 2007, 06:04 PM

The signal coming off a DVD is 720x480. You can either upscale it at the DVD player, send the higher resolution signal to the HDTV, then have the HDTV display it, or you can send the DVD resolution signal to the HDTV, have the HDTV upscale it, and then have the HDTV display it. Neither way is inherently better, but it seems that most HDTVs have crappy upscalers (due to cost or other motivations), so some people buy DVD players that do the upscaling.

You're not gaining any quality in the upscaling process, you're just preventing yourself from losing quality by using a good upscaler. I think most of the software media players (Quicktime, VLC, etc) do a pretty good job and I doubt there is much variation between them.

macgeek2005 · Feb 24, 2007, 01:56 AM

So when I downloaded The Fellowship of the Ring in HD, and the uploader said that the extended scenes were "Upconverted" from DVD quality, what did he mean by that? The quality of the extended scenes looked significantly better than DVD, but not quite as good as HD.

Explain?

brokenjago · Feb 24, 2007, 04:26 AM

Um, I don't think you're allowed to talk about pirating LOTR here.

mduell · Feb 24, 2007, 01:13 PM

Originally Posted by macgeek2005

So when I downloaded The Fellowship of the Ring in HD, and the uploader said that the extended scenes were "Upconverted" from DVD quality, what did he mean by that? The quality of the extended scenes looked significantly better than DVD, but not quite as good as HD.

Either he is much smarter than I am, or he is an idiot. It's possible that the extended scenes were encoded at a higher bitrate anyway (on a DVD, or captured from HDTV, or ripped from an HD-DVD), so even after he stretched and reencoded them they still looked better. It's also possible that you're just imagining things because you want to believe.

But yea, talking about copyright infringement is not allowed here.

P · Feb 25, 2007, 06:17 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

The signal coming off a DVD is 720x480. You can either upscale it at the DVD player, send the higher resolution signal to the HDTV, then have the HDTV display it, or you can send the DVD resolution signal to the HDTV, have the HDTV upscale it, and then have the HDTV display it. Neither way is inherently better, but it seems that most HDTVs have crappy upscalers (due to cost or other motivations), so some people buy DVD players that do the upscaling.

I have to disagree here - the DVD player has the potential to do a better job than the TV, because it can use the information from future frames to interpolate the extra pixels. A TV can't - the only way it could would be to delay the picture a few frames, but then it might be out of sync with the sound, if the sound is sent to a separate receiver to surround speakers. The DVD can simply delay the sound output to match the video.

As for the LOTR question... You can do a lot of things to improve the quality of the image from a DVD, such as deringing or deblocking. Many of these take a lot of RAM or CPU time and can't be done a in a stand-alone DVD-player, or can't be done in realtime at all. You could, in theory, take a DVD, upscale and postprocess it and then recompress it to HD-quality. It still wouldn't be up to the quality of a real Bluray or HD-DVD, but it might very well be better than what an upscaling DVD could produce.