At 7:17 AM -0500 12/14/04, Tom Barry wrote: >In practical terms that is probably what happens when anyone watches a >DVD these days on a 720p or 1080i display. The image is first captured >on film, telecined quite often to higher resolutions, telecined and >compressed to 480p (except still with interlace filtering) and then for >customers that have progressive DVD players scaled to the larger size of >the display. > >There is a fairly large consensus on AVS that upscaling of DVD's does >indeed look better and I've seem some convincing screen shots. > >But it is still not HD, just better than 480p. > >Due to limitations of my own HTPC setup I've been mostly limited to 540p >myself. And this on a slower machine where I can't take advantage of >the better software scaling available in the common ffdshow filter. Several interesting issues here: First, upscaling does work quite well with one caveat - you need high quality samples to scale. If your samples are compromised, the result of the scaling will also be compromised. In the case of DVD movies, there are several things working in favor of the production of high quality samples. First, the spatial resolution is limited to 720 x 480/576, and more important, the source frame rate is 24P. Also of importance is the benefit of the source having been oversampled, typically on film, but sometimes by an HD camera. This source must be compressed to an AVERAGE bit rate of about 5-6 Mbps, but data rates can spike up to about 11 Mbps for short bursts. Even with this headroom, however, many scenes still fall apart and require the attention of a compressionist. By tweaking the MPEG encoder settings, and or low pass filtering the source, objectionable artefacts can be minimized. As a result, the quality of the samples on a DVD are about as good as you will find, when comparing various sources of MPEG-2 compressed material. In addition, progressive DVD players can use flags in the transport stream to help with de-interlacing. There are perceptible benefits in bumping the resolution. But the biggest advantage to an HD DVD, comes from the removal of the interlaced footprint. It is indeed unfortunate, but as Tom points out, the current generation of DVDs is limited by the need to filter for interlace. This WAS NOT NECESSARY, but it happened. IF all DVD players had included a simple low pass filter, then the source could be optimized for progressive display, adding more vertical detail - the filters would remove this detail on the interlaced outputs of the player. One must assume that the same mistake will not happen again with HD-DVD. One would expect that the movie would be encoded with the highest levels of detail possible, and that the player would create a filtered interlaced output after downconversion from the HD format. What I would like to see is 1024 x 576 @24P with full vertical detail and full color detail (4:4:4). I am virtually certain that this would compare very well with 720@24P using 4:2:0 encoding when upconverted to 720P. Regards Craig ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.