Posted by Bill's News on 04/28/06 19:11

Bill's News wrote:
> Jeff Rife wrote:
>> Bill's News (BillsNews@pcmagic.net) wrote in alt.video.dvd:
>>> Are we suggesting that
>>> an
>>> "upconverter" placed between the cable box and the monitor would
>>> improve picture quality of the lower definition sources?
>>
>> Without a doubt.
>>
>> I've been watching the "Babylon 5" DVDs lately, and they look
>> pretty
>> bad at 480i due to the way they were mastered (there are many
>> threads
>> about this if you want more info). But, *all* the issues disappear
>> when viewing output at 1080i. All the upconversion I do has access
>> to the original MPEG data, though, so that might be a difference.
>
> Thanks Jeff. By "original MPEG data," I presume you mean DVDs? But
> your response seems to indicate that broadcast SD TV will benefit
> from
> a converter, so I'm browsing now.

It's becoming slightly clearer now. Equipment: Westinghouse 42" 1080p
monitor, cable co. supplied Motorola H-DVR (1080i), Buffalo LT
DVD/Network video player (1080i), 2gp4 - 512 - 720 GB tower equipped
with Hauppauge 250 (or USB2) capture @ 480i.

While the BLT manual states that DVD upconvert is disabled, this is
clearly not true - as I doubt it is possible to get better picture
quality via component output than it does now from DVDs!! (sadly, I've
discovered that I had bought some "letter-box" DVDs some years ago,
which actually look quite silly on the wide screen monitor, and can
not be properly scaled with the equipment on hand).

The Motorola H-DVR will display great HDTV broadcast images, and
replays of them from its HDD, but it apparently does not upconvert
480i - thus those broadcasts have a relatively washed out appearance
for digital (which may be 480p??), more so for analog channels, and
even more so when I instruct the player that no 720p nor 1080i is
available over the component output leads.

There is also no question that the BLT does indeed upconvert any video
it plays from the networked PCs.

OK, so I can capture MPEG2 SDTV via S-Video from the cable box and its
payback, via the BLT component out, is actually better visual quality
than the same material coming from the cable box. However, when
playing videos from the LAN, the BLT only scales (zooms) within the
source frame, thus 480i/p letter-boxed captures can not be made full
screen. Both the BLT and Westinghouse fill-screen "zoom" is
ludicrous, as it stretches rather than over-scans. Whereas, the BLT
DVD zoom is almost perfect, at level 1, for example, scaling 2.25 to
~1.75 (barely overscanned vertically and trimmed at both sides).

Ah! But - convert the 480i MPEG2 captures to 16:9 cropped xvid/AVI (at
decent quality codec settings) and the image created by the BLT rivals
the image from a DVD, while also fitting the screen properly without
further ado.

Now this is not the final word - as I'm not yet using DVI to the
monitor (presently only available from the Motorola box), so I don't
know whether the monitor has any "upconversion" capabilities of its
own - none is claimed nor denied in its accompanying documentation.

Rating the experience personally of switching from SDTV to HDTV: about
4 out of 10 at this time. Not because HDTV isn't vastly superior to
SDTV, but because programming for it is rarely interesting (to me) and
the "magic" required to get the most out of the display is just that -
MAGIC!!

Upconvert is obviously different from scaling in that an image which
uses all 1080 rows of the display (properly scaled) looks measurably
better when presented via an "upconverter."

In the equipment I've listed here, upconversion seems to be needed
only in non-HDTV programming coming from the cable converter (Motorola
H-DVR) when playing non-HDTV digital or analog sources. If this is
not overcome by enabling the DVI out of that unit, then a converted
between it and the monitor would be my next step.

At any rate, how is the average DVD, or cable TV, customer supposed to
cope with all this technophilia just because they bought an HDTV??
While I've only been exploring this for 2 weeks, and have all the time
that retirement allows for this, the vast majority of customers simply
want to be able to plug in the equipment and get good results!!

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