PC - HDMI Upscaling?

Tommy B

Tommy B

Tommy B

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I've noticed DVD players that are marketed as "HDMI Upscaling."

If you've got a PC connected to an HD TV, does your PC pretty much do the same thing. Surely I'm correct, because your PC is changing the resolution of the DVD from (720*576) and sending it to the TV at a much higher res (1280*1024 for example)
 
Yes, whatever your pc desktop resolution is set to the graphics card will scale whatever you're viewing to.

There's a program called ffdshow that will take the job of scaling away from your video card (whilst doing it a lot better) and scale to any resolution you like (irrespective of desktop settings)
 
very..

My AMD 2800 Barton manages 720p using Theatertek at about 70% CPU, turning on any other features like post processing and the playback becomes choppy - fortuntaely the quality of the Nvidia codecs mean that's not needed.

The actual resolution I output at is 1440x778 which hovers around 80% CPU.

I'm not sure how you'd specify it to do 1080i not sure why anyone would want to either.

1920x1080 gave me choppy playback.

It's generally considered you need at least 3.0GHz to work with ffdshow but the quicker the better, since it came out I think codecs have improved so its other features aren't as important and its mainly used for scaling.
 
@ Tommy B

Yes, but gfx cards normally do very simple scaling in the hardware. FFdshow lets you use allsorts of other scaling algorithms, and you can customise values in each. FFdshow is also very good at removing noise, which is useful, but can also be quite CPU intensive.

The exception, is Nvida Purevideo, and a GPU that supports it. This can provide very decent upscaling (not quite upto FFDshow's standard), but uses far less CPU power.
 
Just to backup Goatboy, FFDSHOW is far far far better at upscaling video than any graphics card I'm aware of on the market at the moment. It can just be a bit of a ***** to setup.
 
Quick & dirty quide for high def HTPC..

FFDshow to scale

NV card with purevideo decoder to de-interlace 1080i (pixel adaptive), nothing else Ive tried comes close, you throw away half the res if you dont use pixel adaptive.

FFDshow to sharpen dvd's etc (not needed for high def, only scaled up dvd's).

there are alternatives, Dscaler, coreavc etc etc..

whatever method you use be prepared to spend silly amounts of time fiddling.

my spec is the same as a high end gaming rig, kinda silly really.

If I was to do it again I would buy an external scaler, still tempted to do so.

Once HDMI 1.3 is supported by external scalers I will probably go that route & dump trying to get an HTPC to do the work.
 
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