Computer as upconverting DVD player

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

So I remember going home during thanksgiving and lugging my desktop around. My friend wanted to watch Gladiator, and we were wondering if it was better to use the comp (which I hooked up to my TV or the DVD player with no upconversion capabilities. Well, we decided to go with the computer because it made sense that the computer was doing the upconversion.

BTW my computer is hooked up to my HDTV via VGA cables (no DVI on the Sony Bravia XBR2).

How does the computer fare as an upconverting DVD player?

I guess it helps to say I have a 7800GT.

 

[Shawn]

A computer is far superior. Using Vista's Media Center regular DVDs look amazing on my HDTV. Sure they don't look as nice as HD-DVD but they definitely look better than basic SD cable.

 

[BD2003]

I dunno if your bravia can set a 1:1 pixel ratio, but if it can, and you set your res to the native res of your panel, thatll be a good start to make it look it's best. DVDs are high bitrate for their res, and mastered as well as they can be, if youre concerned about keeping the original source as intact as possible, you can only gain so much by upconverting, which isnt much, and you probably won't really notice the difference.

If youre technically inclined, you can use ffdshow to really make DVDs look nice. It's not the upconverting so much that makes it look better, but what you can do with it. You cant use ffdshow with MCE though AFAIK...I use mediaportal. I dont think you'd really gain much over a regular upconverting DVD by using MCE.

For DVDs, I first apply a bit of denoise3d. Just a little bit that it smooths imperfections out without destroying the picture quality. Then I upsize to the display res using lanczos at 1.20 to sharpen it up...any higher and you see too many artifacts. Then I apply a very slight amount of noise at the higher res..the finer noise seems to trick your eye into thinking it's more detailed than it really is.

If you use xvid/divx, first a bit of nic's postprocessing at 50% removes some of the blockiness without destroying the detail. Then denoise 3d gets rid of the rest of the garbage and color fluttering you get with mpeg4. Then a little deband to counteract the banding you get in dark scenes, but this filter has a tendency to rape your CPU. Then the lanczos resize. Looks MUCH better afterwards. I dont bother with the noise with xvid, because even after all that processing, it's still fairly obvious it's low res, and the noise doesnt really do much to make it look better.