Upconverting content to HDTV

[DisgruntledVirus]

Quick question. I have converted all my DVD's to AVI's for ease of use/portability and file size, even though it results in a loss of quality. My question is that I plan on streaming the content to a HDTV, will the TV upconvert the picture if I am using WMP (using a DVI-HDMI cable) or just play it without processing it? If it would not upconvert the file, then would I be better off A) trying to find a software program that will upconvert to HDTV resolution B) re-encoding the files in something like H.264 or another format or C) making them .iso images and just playing them on a virtual drive? Most of the stuff is just standard DVD resolution, which looks fine on my PC monitor at full screen (Dell 2407WFP running at 1920x1280), but will it look horrible on a HDTV played from the PC?

 

[Quasmo]

Speaking as someone who has a 1080P projector and HTPC. I'd say that WMP or VLC will upscale the image and it looks pretty good. Not HD quality but still good. MPEG2 is a crappy compression. Divx is a better compressor so the image will still look good.

 

[Auric]

A decent TV from the last decade will likely have a scaler good enough that there will be little advantage to pre-emptively scaling it on the PC.

Indeed, since not software scaling now, you will prolly be surprised with the increase in quality versus the simple PC monitor, despite the larger size for the same resolution.

Ideally for quality the DVD's would be played as-is or from images. Recoding to AVC would virtually maintain quality while using much less capacity and also elminate all the nonsense warnings/advertisements/menus. But it would consume muy PC-time if not personal time. Also, you would have to be careful to conform to standard to maintain hardware acceleration (unlike the vast majority done with the x264 encoder).