DVD playback - upconverting software?

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Clockworks

Supreme [H]ardness
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I'm getting into playing DVDs on my desktop and I was wondering if there was any software the would upconvert DVDs to 1080p like some hardware upconverters. I tried playing back on WMC and it was pretty bad (resolution is at 1920x1200). Thank you
 
Try using VLC player...

I'm brand new to this as well, but I just stuck on a movie file that was 640x480 and it looked really decent on my 1080p screen.
 
Forget VLC, it's garbage. If you're going with a stand alone app then get Media Player Classic: Home Cinema.

The way upconverting works on a PC is by installing your drivers, setting your resolution and letting your hardware do the work.

What do you mean it looked bad and what software are you using?
 
aeonrevolution said:
Whats wrong with VLC?
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It's trash. For one thing it doesn't do hardware acceleration like any decent, competent video player this side of 2004 does. Second, I've never seen a video player make HD videos look like someone smeared vasoline all over my moniter. MPC plays then fine and quality looks awesome. VLC? Vasoline all over my screen.

Those are two very good reasons why VLC is trash. Utter trash.
 
CrimandEvil said:
Forget VLC, it's garbage. If you're going with a stand alone app then get Media Player Classic: Home Cinema.

The way upconverting works on a PC is by installing your drivers, setting your resolution and letting your hardware do the work.

What do you mean it looked bad and what software are you using?
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It looked very blocky, I was using Media Player Center.
 
News flash: every time you click "full screen" to view your PowerDVD/WinDVD/WIndows Media Player in full screen mode you're upconverting to whatever resolution your monitor is running. Any other enhancements are thanks to nVidia Purevideo or the playback software itself, but they don't generally improve the picture at all. Use anything but VLC and be happy.
 
sorry no. playing a dvd in windows and clicking fullscreen, so 1080p since my monitor is 1920x1080, just stretches the image and it looks like crap. playing it in my HD-A30 HD-DVD player upscales the same dvd to 1080p and it looks fantastic. its not the same. which is what the op was trying to get at, obviously. some of you take your geekiness too seriously and sacrifice common sense.
 
LawGiver said:
sorry no. playing a dvd in windows and clicking fullscreen, so 1080p since my monitor is 1920x1080, just stretches the image and it looks like crap. playing it in my HD-A30 HD-DVD player upscales the same dvd to 1080p and it looks fantastic. its not the same. which is what the op was trying to get at, obviously. some of you take your geekiness too seriously and sacrifice common sense.
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No. It is the same damn thing. The video card, if you are using anything other then overlay, takes the video stream and converts it into data that the video card's hardware understands. That this point, if you're resolution is set to 1920x1080 or whatever, the video card redraws the video stream and applies whatever post processing effects that are turned on (like "Purevideo" and "Avivo" are mostly a suit of post processing effects, mostly).

So, depending on your settings it either looks like crap fullscreened if you don't know what you're doing or it looks close too/on par/better then a hardware dedicated upscaler. If you know what you're doing. :rolleyes:

OP: So what video card do you have? What settings are in use? What TV are you using? Is this Vista Media Center??
 
CrimandEvil said:
No. It is the same damn thing.
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Not always. Some devices actually do upscale well using algorithms such as EMEDI, MEDI, ICBI, etc. After that, they usually add some kind of post-processing effects, too. Unfortunately, today's processors aren't fast enough to use any of those upscaling algorithms. Maybe in a few years or so.

The closest you can get to that is to use AviSynth with some relatively good resizing plugins plus a dash of post-processing.
 
LawGiver said:
sorry no. playing a dvd in windows and clicking fullscreen, so 1080p since my monitor is 1920x1080, just stretches the image and it looks like crap. playing it in my HD-A30 HD-DVD player upscales the same dvd to 1080p and it looks fantastic. its not the same. which is what the op was trying to get at, obviously. some of you take your geekiness too seriously and sacrifice common sense.
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This pretty much summarizes what I am talking about, thank you, LawGiver.

No, I did not know the correct name for it so I called it upconverting as opposed to upscaling. Either way, everyone here knew what I was talking about, no need to roll eyes and be a jerk about it.

CrimandEvil said:
No. It is the same damn thing. The video card, if you are using anything other then overlay, takes the video stream and converts it into data that the video card's hardware understands. That this point, if you're resolution is set to 1920x1080 or whatever, the video card redraws the video stream and applies whatever post processing effects that are turned on (like "Purevideo" and "Avivo" are mostly a suit of post processing effects, mostly).

So, depending on your settings it either looks like crap fullscreened if you don't know what you're doing or it looks close too/on par/better then a hardware dedicated upscaler. If you know what you're doing. :rolleyes:

OP: So what video card do you have? What settings are in use? What TV are you using? Is this Vista Media Center??
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No, I don't know what I am doing, thank you for pointing it out. I have an AMD HD 4870 and playing on a Samsung 24" monitor through DVI. I am using Vista MC. I will update the video driver and report back when that is done. It seems to be crashing when I check the settings for Avivo in CCC.
 
Clockworks said:
No, I don't know what I am doing, thank you for pointing it out. I have an AMD HD 4870 and playing on a Samsung 24" monitor through DVI. I am using Vista MC. I will update the video driver and report back when that is done. It seems to be crashing when I check the settings for Avivo in CCC.
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I was referring to Lawgiver who speaks like he knows while not really. Calm the fuck down. :rolleyes:
 
Well, I installed Windows 7 (clean), CCC, and the Avivo thing from ATI. Quality improved a bit but it's still not the improvement that I see from my upscaling DVD player. Ah well, I guess you take what you can get. :/
 
you must still have settings weird? i dont know though, because it should look fantastic right 'out of the box'.

have you fiddled with the avivo settings themselves? maybe its set to 'fast' quality or something... sorry its been awhile since i had an ati card so im not sure.

btw, are you comparing the image on your computer monitor with an image from a tv (with your upcoverting dvd player)?
 
All I can offer is (and I know it's not much) I use Windows 7 exclusively as my DVD player. DVDs are all played through media center out to my 46" toshiba using DVI to HDMI.

Shitty DVDs still look like Shitty DVDs, but the newer higher quality stuff looks pretty darn good.
 
Nothing can touch a "real" upsampling DVD player (not the $100 garbage ones).

Watching DVDs through my Oppo BDP-83 is only a hair away from "HD". I've never seen any app on a computer come close to its dedicated hardware processor.

Even WMCHT using CoreAVC and CUDA is like apples to oranges for quality.
 
There is a difference between what up-converting hardware found in stand-alone players and what people here call up-conversion, something that is usually just a little bit of edge enhancement on top of scaling the video. Just compare something converted by a new Anchor Bay chip to something coming out of media center.
 
Install matroski(sp) splitter and AC3 filter and use wmp on W7... works great for dvd's. Thats what I use for 1080p upconverting on my 50"
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Install ffdshow, enable it for 'RAW' streams, and use whatever scaling and postprocessing algorithms you want, it will be added to the decode graph for every format. You can even use an AVISynth script to process the video in realtime.
 
krupted said:
you must still have settings weird? i dont know though, because it should look fantastic right 'out of the box'.

have you fiddled with the avivo settings themselves? maybe its set to 'fast' quality or something... sorry its been awhile since i had an ati card so im not sure.

btw, are you comparing the image on your computer monitor with an image from a tv (with your upcoverting dvd player)?
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Yes, that is what I am doing, I'm guessing that is probably not going to give me the result I want, is it.... :/

mattjw916 said:
Nothing can touch a "real" upsampling DVD player (not the $100 garbage ones).

Watching DVDs through my Oppo BDP-83 is only a hair away from "HD". I've never seen any app on a computer come close to its dedicated hardware processor.

Even WMCHT using CoreAVC and CUDA is like apples to oranges for quality.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm figuring, sadly. I'll try the other software that people recommended here.
 
Clockworks said:
I'm getting into playing DVDs on my desktop and I was wondering if there was any software the would upconvert DVDs to 1080p like some hardware upconverters. I tried playing back on WMC and it was pretty bad (resolution is at 1920x1200). Thank you
Click to expand...
Try Power DVD 9 Ultra, Has lots of up conversion options and does a pretty good job at making a standard DVD look good on my 60"
 
Clockworks said:
Yes, that is what I am doing, I'm guessing that is probably not going to give me the result I want, is it.... :/
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its certainly not going to be as nice on your computer monitor as it is on a newer lcd tv. the reason being, youre actually enhancing the video twice on the tv... once at the dvd player (upconverting) and the tv itself enhances any image it gets (dramatically in many cases)

computer monitors are like studio monitor speakers. they just put out what they get, good or bad. generally, for movie watching you will get MUCH better results on a lcd tv because thats what they are designed to do- they actually have scaling/enhancing hardware in them, which is also the very reason youre not supposed to use a lcd tv as a computer monitor (even though many people do).

if there was a way to feed your dvd player into your computer monitor, i would bet that it looks the same as windows media center does. alternatively, if you feed your computer into your tv itll also look about the same (i would honestly think better then your dvd player, but theres no way to tell for sure until you try)
 
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