Apple's DVD software and 1080p upscale conversion.

[Compman55]

I know longer own a DVD player, so I decided to use my mini. I am not familiar with the turn 1080p upscale conversion. However the full screen DVD video I tried watching was in 1920x1080, and look pretty good, and I know it was recorded before 1080p was ever thought of. So am I safe to assume when the display is in 1920x1080, and I goto full screen that I am getting 1080p quality DVD playback??

 

[TheStu]

DVDs are 480p, that is 480 pixels high by whatever pixels wide (depends on full vs wide screen). 1080p is 1920*1080 pixels in size. No technology (yet) no matter how fancy, can create something out of nothing and make 480p be 1080p. What is does is some fancy between the lines shit to expand the image without it stretching and distorting like a balloon.

DVD Player in OS X is pretty good though, and if you are happy with it, stick with it, but I can't say for sure if DVD Player has upsampling, I don't know if that is something that Apple ever 'announced'.

 

[Compman55]

Reason I ask is becuase best buy has DVD players on display that say" 1080P upscale conversion". I was not quite sure what that was all about.

 

[0roo0roo]

I know longer own a DVD player, so I decided to use my mini. I am not familiar with the turn 1080p upscale conversion. However the full screen DVD video I tried watching was in 1920x1080, and look pretty good, and I know it was recorded before 1080p was ever thought of. So am I safe to assume when the display is in 1920x1080, and I goto full screen that I am getting 1080p quality DVD playback??

you don't get detail from nothing. upscaling is fancy talk for blowing up an image to fit the screen. you do this with ANY image that is smaller than your native resolution when showing it full screen, upscaling does nothing more than this. how would you display 720x480 on a 1920x1080 screen anyways? if it were using 1:1 pixels it would be 1/6th the screen in a little window. real 1080p video has 6 times the pixels, there is no way to make a dvd look like that. playing a youtube video in full screen is also "upscaling". its become polluted with marketing to mean something magical when its just resizing an image.

as for dvd players, the point is to do the conversion earlier esp if you don't trust your tv to do a good job of it.

some xylon bluray screenshots
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=811102
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1073677&page=4
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/Revenge%20of the Fallen/f1ce9822.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/Revenge of the Fallen/8de58e2b.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/Revenge of the Fallen/c14345f2.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/WizardofOz/6226b52c.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/WizardofOz/60adfef4.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/Snow White/26236947.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/adzez/Snow White/4f73166e.png
search the forums for his posts for plenty more.

http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?sid=103808061&sdm=web&pt=rd right click save as 1080p trailer video
http://wdmp-7.vo.llnwd.net/d1/wdsmp/TRON/42Ent/1Trlr/Grid_1tlr_1920x800_1080p.mov
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?sid=103580704&sdm=web&pt=rd
that shows you the difference, blurays got a much higher bitrate than any internet material. youtube stuff like most streaming is starved, you aren't going to stream 50gb of material equivalent of a bluray disc in a few hours after all.

 

[Compman55]

Well guys, not sure of the technology or even how it works, but I just dug out an old DVD player and it looks crappy when you let the TV upscale it for you. However when you play the same DVD thru apples dvd program, it blows it up without all the pixle disortion. Granted, it looks nothing like a new blue ray, but very good.

 

[0roo0roo]

the other thing is that old dvd player will output analog to the tv, so the tv is trying to scale a degraded image. that is the advantage of the upscaling dvd player using hdmi, it does it earlier on the raw video data so it comes out cleaner.

 

[QueBert]

Well guys, not sure of the technology or even how it works, but I just dug out an old DVD player and it looks crappy when you let the TV upscale it for you. However when you play the same DVD thru apples dvd program, it blows it up without all the pixle disortion. Granted, it looks nothing like a new blue ray, but very good.

A good upscaller will give you pretty decent results. I have seen DVD's look damn near 720p quality on a good player. I haven't tried a DVD on my Hackintosh but if the upscaller's good I'm definitely curious about seeing the improvement.