Upconversion of GBPVR Recordings?

[bdgbill]

I just bought a Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player. The HD-DVD playback was pretty much what I expected but the upconversion of standard DVD's blew me away.

My standard DVD's look 90% as good as the HD content from my STB. This is really way beyond what I expected.

I thought I saw a post somewhere about upconverting DVD's with FFD Show. Is it possible to upconvert my tv recordings with FFD? My GBPVR rig is 2.4 GHZ and should have the horsepower.

This would really be the best of both worlds. I noticed that since I got an HD TV I have been watching my recordings less, prefering to watch whatever is on one of the 7 HD channels I get.

I'm assuming that if it is possible I would need a new video card since my card has only S-video and composite out.

Is anyone doing this?

[K.S.]

according to the german c't mag (they still tend to produce good reviews) the quality using fddshow & avisynth for the upscaling they have tested should be comparable to HW upscalers. but i doubt your CPU has the horsepower needed, at least not for 1080i/p...

they have tested it only on computer displays with different standard resolutions, no HDTV sets
here some of their setups which played back with no stutters:
Turion64 MT32 (1,8 GHz, Single-Core) DVD upscaled to 1280
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2 GHz) upscaled to 1440
Core 2 Duo E6400 (2,16 GHz) upscaled to 1680

[wtg]

So doesn't the video card hardware do this to some extent anyway? It is after all scaling the picture to the output resolution.

What exactly is fddshow & avisynth doing that the video card isn't?

[nitrogen_widget]

So doesn't the video card hardware do this to some extent anyway? It is after all scaling the picture to the output resolution.

What exactly is fddshow & avisynth doing that the video card isn't?

I'm going to try & explain it as how I see it from past experiance using FFDSHOW so feel free to tell me if i'm wrong.

Yes & no.
The video card does scale the video to the resolution in hardware, but that is it.
It doesn't take into account the source content at all.
It just makes it bigger without taxing the CPU.

For DVD's this usually looks fine.

but with FFDSHOW you can deblock, sharpen, even scale in software.
Using FFDSHOW gives a better interpolation from my point of view & therefore a crisper picture when upscaling.

It just takes a lot of CPU horsepower so you may be limited to just deblocking (which still gives a better picture to me)

[K.S.]

So doesn't the video card hardware do this to some extent anyway? It is after all scaling the picture to the output resolution.

What exactly is fddshow & avisynth doing that the video card isn't?

nitrogen_widget has explained it good, another quick & dirty example: an HDTV set is also upscaling SD source or you'd only see a small portion of your screen in action but the algorithm used is comparable to the upscaling the GPU does, it's mediocre. otherwise you wouldn't have such a difference between good upscaler players with HDTV in comparision to the usual DVD player with the same HDTV. it's surprising that HDTV producers ain't able to use good quality DSP. instead the customer has to pay for the useless DSP in the HDTV & the DSP in the player. to make it even worse: the integrated DSP is even used to upscale 1080i input (about 4%) to afterwards crop it back to 1080i. they do that overscan correction since the days of CRT & not everybody has stopped that bullshit

for further literature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_scaler & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan

[Deusxmachina]

http://projecthtpc.co.uk/software3results.html
http://www.htpcnews.com/forums/index.php...hl=ffdshow

[gazoo]

So, if I switch those settings indicated on the post on FFDSHOW is that all that needs to be done? Do I have to enable ffdshow postprocessing? What if ffdshow is not being used as the mpeg codec, will the postprocessing enable it?

[bdgbill]

http://projecthtpc.co.uk/software3results.html
http://www.htpcnews.com/forums/index.php...hl=ffdshow

Thanks. These links are great. Looks like I have a weekend project coming up. Time to get my hands dirty with GBPVR again!

[pBS]

just looks like a 'sharpen' was added...no biggie...

now that we're using d3d to output video, there are options available in video card driver..
you can get same effect from video card by turning up 3d filtering functions..
notably ansiotropic filtering ...it provides seemingly the same effect as those settings.. but you can also up the sharpening of the capture driver for similar effect...but better to sharpen just before output from pc [video card]..
usually anti-aliasing blurs video, so don't use much if any...

the processing power ffdshow takes is huge, and even tho it looks *slightly* better, i didn't think it was worth the instability..but YMMV as always..

i think it's because i have alot of postprocessing built-in to my vid card drivers..[ATI]
i use a x1550 right now but HD 2600 has same if not better postprocessing than ffdshow, built into hardware...the new cards have nice DSP filters finally..anything hd2400 or + should have the new filtering..
not sure on nvidia side but i think the 8xxx series does also..

play with your 3d settings to see if cant get similar quality..it just works better if you can...
better yet, try both and post screenshots..

[Deusxmachina]

you can get same effect from video card by turning up 3d filtering functions..
notably ansiotropic filtering ...it provides seemingly the same effect as those settings..

i think it's because i have alot of postprocessing built-in to my vid card drivers..[ATI]

I'd say someone could make a case for Nvidia cards being comparable in a quick-and-dirty kind of way since those at least have user-controlled edge enhancement and noise reduction, but ATI cards don't have anything like that that's not already factory-set. The ATI can probably be changed with a registry hack, but then again people already change the registry to turn OFF ATI's factory-on noise reduction since it's less than stellar.

The 8800s are supposed to have excellent edge enhancement and noise reduction now. The 6xxx and 7xxx series apparently have a lesser version of edge enhance, it halos pretty easily, but it's still good for quick-and-dirty.

Deinterlacing aside, I don't know how a video card could enhance as well as FFdshow simply due to lesser amount of options if nothing else, but for having a mere two sliders to use, yeah, my 7600gt can definitely make the picture pop.

I see ATI 8.2 is out and am typing this before going to see what's new in them. I've only used up to 8.1.