Upconverting DVDs on a HTPC

[zakir]

Hey Folks,

I am curious about this question so here we go,Can we possibly upconvert DVDs on a HTPC? I would think it would be a software based upconversion,I don't know whether it is right or not. Do we need a special DVD or blu-ray drive to upconvert, or if there was even software out there to handle the task.
this are my specifications.
Television: Samsung 46" LCD LN46A550
Blu-ray: High-end HTPC
Receiver: Onkyo 605
Speakers: Polk RM6750
- APC H15 - Cyron HT1506 -

any thoughts??

[chroma]

The applications are reporting the source video size. Whenever you play a video at something other than it's native size you are using some kind of up scaling or down scaling. There is no magic that will create the detail of HD video from an SD source.Some codecs include un preventing options to reduce macro blocking that comes from high compression. Your graphics card probably has some sharpening and noise reduction features. Use these sparingly though. You can easily make the picture worse.There are "super resolution" techniques which can produce sharper edges with fewer aliasing artifacts by combining information from several frames.

[Raine]

PC can something upconvert a DVD or any video much better than the standalone player you can use FFDShows to upconvertthe snap and soar the qualit.All you need is a decent machine to do that on DVDs w/out drop frame.Remember that if the bit rate of the video source (aka downloaded videos, etc.) isn't high/good enough, the output will be a shoddy work,as for the purevideo decoder, if you are using optical pass through to output the audio signal to your stereo receiver, then just get the bronze one is good enough!! the only different in all the version is audio decoding.In this case PC isn't doing anything regarding the audio, just passing it straight through to the stereo receiver and let the receiver do the decoding

[Sam.D]

You know what there is a whole industry based around the efforts to upconvert DVD's on HTPC's. It is a time consuming process finding the good application and an even longer process optimizing the settings to your hardware specifications to obtain the optimum quality output, which is often subjective provided you have good enough hardware specs to support the software. I had a hard time to configure a decent setup only to discover my pc not up to it. Many seem to get into it largely due to their love for tweaking and optimizing. Personally, I love it when things just work. So I ended just buying an upconverting DVD player and hooked it up to my monitor--a no-brainer solution that involved to tweaking and fool-proof performance.