The DVD Upscaling Thread

[Blinx123]

Hi,

this thread is for SD/HD comparison of regular standard DVDs and some discussion about upscaling and/or video processing.

I'll begin with a comparison picture of Lord Of The Rings:

Regular:

http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/2190/snapnw4.png

Processed:

http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5277/snap1qj9.png



I know that non of both is really upscaled but I have a problem with Vista and FFDSHOW (can't grab pictures with FFDSHOW + I get high judder and asyncing when trying to resize). So I had to get stuck to the standard upconverting of the monitor. I'll search after my mothers PC tomorow (can't find it at the moment) so that I can post some really terrific pictures of "The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King" and "StarWars V: The Empire Strikes Back Digital Release" which I made about one year ago. But first these 2 are the only pictures I can serve you with.

Looking forward to see some upscaled/processed pictures from other people around the world.

BTW: Anyone here who knows how to switch the language in FFDSHOW? Installed the German version by mistake and now I've serious problems to find out which option is which (I do speak German too but they named the German options fairly different.)

PS: I was really ill about this damn bugs under VISTA so I forgot to make it fullscreen when grabing the regular version. But trust me: You won't see a better image in Full-Screen. The processed version is still a lot better.

[Blinx123]

And finaly they are here. The truely scaled pictures. Posted them in the Lord Of The Rings Blu-Ray (hoax) thread already.

HD (768p):

http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/367/grab06538fy8.png

SD (PAL, Special sharpening options are deactivated of course. So the only sharpness is the natural one of the DVD picture and the player/display.)

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/7...ab12246gd2.png



HD: http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/5...ab23113hs1.png

SD: http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/8...ab01416bm4.png




Anyone else here who is into heavy hq upscaling or remastering?

[GetMeABeer]

I haven't seen Blue-ray's HD transfer of Rocky, but when I watch the DVD version in my HD player it looks tremendously better. It cleans up the picture and almost eliminates the spotty pixels that really bothered me. This title really impressed me in terms of upscale of a STD DVD on an HD DVD player.

[Blinx123]

Originally Posted by GetMeABeer

I haven't seen Blue-ray's HD transfer of Rocky, but when I watch the DVD version in my HD player it looks tremendously better. It cleans up the picture and almost eliminates the spotty pixels that really bothered me. This title really impressed me in terms of upscale of a STD DVD on an HD DVD player.

I suppose it has a much higher bitrate than Lord Of The Rings then?

I think when upscaling DVDs it's all about bitrates (low bitrate= high artefacting). Maybe I'll try some higher bitrate movies when my Barco Projector arrives. Like The Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition which should've a like 1,5mbps higher bitrate and some of my Disney collection films.

BTW: StarWars V: The Empire Strikes Back really do look awesome on my videoprocessor. Looks like a Blu-Ray movie on some points and I can even see the unclear skin of imperial fleet captian before he get's killed by Darth Vader.

[johnnyvenom]

can the ps3 upscale as well?

[peterhefer1]

yes, and does a good job

[Blinx123]

Damn. Anyone else seeing missing detail in comparison to the other HD upscaled one? I did shut the post processing option off to get into the right colour gamut.

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8813/pic18224ck5.png

Is it just me or was the previous one with "post processing = on" and the false colour gamut more detailed?

PS: I don't know why the other one is zoomed in that much in comparison with this one.

[Navarone]

No upscaling thread would be complete without this informative thread from AVS:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=782887

It was an upscaling test (unbiased) between the Toshiba HD XA2 and the Crystallio II VP. The Crystallio is a very expensive (+ $5k) video processor/upscaler for professional/high end enthusiast use. It uses the Gennum VXP chip. The XA2 uses the Reon video processor chip from Silicon Optix.

The results were surprising. The XA2 was the declared winner.

What does this mean for folks interested in buying a DVD player to upscale SD DVD content to near HD quality? If you want the best, beg, borrow or buy an XA2. There is no finer upscaler in it's class currently being made. The XA2 will also play HD content from HD DVD. A very nice nice bonus!

[Blinx123]

Originally Posted by Navarone

No upscaling thread would be complete without this informative thread from AVS:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=782887

It was an upscaling test (unbiased) between the Toshiba HD XA2 and the Crystallio II VP. The Crystallio is a very expensive (+ $5k) video processor/upscaler for professional/high end enthusiast use. It uses the Gennum VXP chip. The XA2 uses the Reon video processor chip from Silicon Optix.

The results were surprising. The XA2 was the declared winner.

What does this mean for folks interested in buying a DVD player to upscale SD DVD content to near HD quality? If you want the best, beg, borrow or buy an XA2. There is no finer upscaler in it's class currently being made. The XA2 will also play HD content from HD DVD. A very nice nice bonus!

I'm not that surprised about it.

The chips in the Crystalio are of an older generation after all. A test battle between the XA2 and the Ultra-High-End Denon DVD player would be pretty interesting. Both are using the same main processor so the only differences could be in custom chips or firmware.

[holsty101]

I had a marantz dv9600 about a year ago which was state of the art for its price range @ the time ... one of the 1st players to scale to 1080p (in the uk anyway) & it had pages of PQ tweeking sub menus, never got the chance to compare it with hddvd/blu ray scalers or native 1080p though

[Virtual Terror]

Can i just upscaling sucks

[Grubert]

Can any upscaling make the top right sign legible? (Sidenote: "Zapatos baratos para toda la familia" means "Cheap shoes for the whole family")

[Chrome Sushi]

Originally Posted by Virtual Terror

Can i just upscaling sucks

What?.....

[STR8UP&DOWN]

This one's a two-parter ...

I know what the upscaling process is ... I just don't understand how a std DVD, which is in 480p, can be upscaled to 1080i on an HDTV. I mean if the source is only 480p, how is the extra resolution produced? It seems that even if the 480p lines were doubled, you only get 960p, right?

And the flipside of that is, why does a TV broadcast in 480p look so crappy on an HDTV? Shouldn't the same principles work for this like they do for DVD? Both sources are being input through identical HDMI cables. I don't get it ...

480p DVD (upscaled) on an HDTV ... GREAT!
480p TV broadcast on an HDTV ... GROSS!

Is the upscaling player the difference?

[Aurora]

How upscaling works, in a nutshell:

Basically, what an upscaler does is try to fill in missing information. Here's an example:

A_ror_  _s  th_  b_st  p_st_r  _n  th_s  s_te.  Sh_  kn_ws _v_r_th_ng.

I removed some letters from the words from the above sentence. You can probably figure out what it says, despite the missing letters. How would you do it? You'd look for key short words in critical places, like "the" and "is." You would fill those in first, then go from there. You'd then look at the other short words that are missing just a couple letters, figure those out. From there, you'd be able to figure out the longer words from context. You would then be able to figure out that the sentence says

Aurora is the best poster on this site.  She knows everything.

This is basically what an upscaler tries to do. It looks at a smaller picture, and then tries to assemble it into a larger one by filling in the gaps. It uses things like edges to find the boundaries of object, and looks at other changes in the picture--gradients, details, etc. Things like cell animation tend to scale really well because there's an edge, a solid block of color, then another edge--no details or change inbetween the edges. Compare that to someone's face--between the edge of the cheek and nose, there's tons of indentations and pores--a scaler wouldn't be able to predict those.

To do this, it uses prediction and regression algorithms based on probabilities and other stochastic stuff from image processing. I won't go into details, as they depend on the particular implementation (this is why some scalers are better than others), but that's the high level basics of it.


Broadcasts are 480i. That's not a huge deal over 480p, but it is one step down since actual processing must be done to deinterlace. DVDs are also encoded in 480i, but contain flags on how to make the 480p from that without doing too much work. Basically, broadcast gives you the ingredients and tells you to make dinner, while DVD gives you the ingredient and the recipe.

One of the reasons why DVD looks so much better is that there's a lot more information on a DVD than a broadcast. Digital broadcasts are very low bitrate in comparison to DVD, which makes the scaling that much more difficult because there's far less information to use to fill in the gaps.

Go back to our example. Imagine if I gave you

A_ror_  __  ___  b_st  p_st_r  __  th_s  __te.  Sh_  kn_ws _v_r_th_ng.

What are the 2nd and 3rd words? They could be anything. There's lots of 2 and 3 letter words in the English language. With no additional information, you might come up with

Aurora on her best poster is this cute.  She knows everything.

grammatically, that makes sense. On the surface, it is a valid way to fill in the letters and come up with a sentence that makes sense. However, the two sentences seem to have nothing to do with each other, so our guess probably isn't right. Obviously, if someone made a poster of me, it'd be quite cute, and on my best poster, I'd be adorable. However, what that has to do with me knowing everything, I'm not sure.

Unfortunately, a scaler doesn't know what objects are in the picture, which is why more information is better. The scaler will work with what it has, but the more it has, the better guess it can make, which ultimately means the picture looks better.