How do I make 480p look good on 4K TV

[StackUnderflow]

I have a TCL 4K TV from Amazon, trying to watch Star Trek: DS9 on netflix, and the resolution looks horrible, it's really blurry and I can't make out facial expressions even sometimes. Star Trek: TNG, which came before almost a decade before DS9, looks pretty good despite the 4:3 aspect ratio, although it can look super processed at times (imagine beauty mode on your phone was turned on all the time), it was still really good for a show made 25 years ago. Is there a setting or something I can change to make DS9 look at least as good especially since it came out later?

[191x7]

I'm not sure but the TNG on netflix might be the remaster with the default resolution of something like 1440x1080.

[circeseye]

thats weird im currently watching ds9 and yea it doesnt look the best, its not that bad on my samsung 4k..if you want to see bad watch a movie or show from the early 80s or 70s thats not remastered lol...now that looks bad

but maybe try lowering the sharpness..the higher sharpness of 4k tvs can really make older shows look blocky

[johnt]

Watch something else? 

[JoostinOnline]

Try switching through the display modes. That being said, nothing is going to make it look great. Even when the ratio stays the same, upscaling/downscaling leads to an inferior picture quality because interpolation isn't perfect.

[Substance]

Tng, tos and enterprise were remastered for HD several years ago. All seasons were put out on Blu-ray. Sales figures were not encouraging and they didn’t release voyager and ds9 on Blu hence no remastered copies in existence. 

 

Netflix is likely using the early masters made for 480i DVD in the very early 2000s. 

 

Is there any streamer which outputs at native resolution of 480i? I don’t think so. The source is 480i however upscaled to 1080p by the mediocre algorithm of the netflix app. 

[dDave64]

Is it possible the issue is with your internet connection? Are you streaming at the highest quality available?

 

I have a Samsung KS8000 65" 4K TV and I've had decent success getting 480p DVDs to look acceptable. I've been watching Stargate SG1 on DVD recently. I personally don't do a lot of streaming. You have to remember that 480p simply won't ever look as good as 1080p or 2160p, you can only work with what you've got.

 

One thing I would recommend is going to a neutral artificial sharpness settings (most TVs tend to have this setting either be 50 or 0 on whatever scale they're using). The image will look a bit softer but it will get rid of a lot of artifacts that happen on the edges which is worse than a slightly blurry image in my mind. Compression artifacts on streams also don't tend to play nicely with artificial sharpness.

 

I'd head over to Rtings and see exactly what settings they recommend for your specific TV if you think it's a problem with your TV and not the stream. They were very helpful for me (especially for white balancing).

 

 

[circeseye]

On 4/6/2019 at 2:57 PM, dDave64 said:

Is it possible the issue is with your internet connection? Are you streaming at the highest quality available?

 

I have a Samsung KS8000 65" 4K TV and I've had decent success getting 480p DVDs to look acceptable. I've been watching Stargate SG1 on DVD recently. I personally don't do a lot of streaming. You have to remember that 480p simply won't ever look as good as 1080p or 2160p, you can only work with what you've got.

 

One thing I would recommend is going to a neutral artificial sharpness settings (most TVs tend to have this setting either be 50 or 0 on whatever scale they're using). The image will look a bit softer but it will get rid of a lot of artifacts that happen on the edges which is worse than a slightly blurry image in my mind. Compression artifacts on streams also don't tend to play nicely with artificial sharpness.

 

I'd head over to Rtings and see exactly what settings they recommend for your specific TV if you think it's a problem with your TV and not the stream. They were very helpful for me (especially for white balancing).

 

 

some shows are actually not even 480p more like 480i or worse (yes ds9 is one of them) even then its the compression of 480p that they are sending out also. one streaming service may play it one way yet anothers compression makes it look better.
i have actual ripped 480p shows and there is a big difference from that to the same show a streaming service doing 480p shows. the ripped actually looks good on the 4k yet the streaming service is blocky or a different service there's would be good but still can tell its low quality

[kirashi]

On 2/11/2019 at 10:25 AM, StackUnderflow said:

I have a TCL 4K TV from Amazon, trying to watch Star Trek: DS9 on netflix, and the resolution looks horrible, it's really blurry and I can't make out facial expressions even sometimes. Star Trek: TNG, which came before almost a decade before DS9, looks pretty good despite the 4:3 aspect ratio, although it can look super processed at times (imagine beauty mode on your phone was turned on all the time), it was still really good for a show made 25 years ago. Is there a setting or something I can change to make DS9 look at least as good especially since it came out later?

You purchase a remastered copy on BluRay, or use your timemachine to take a RED camera back to when the show was filmed.

[PlayStation 2]

This is an older thread, but 480p probably looks terrible on your TV through Netflix because of the bitrate 480p content is compressed on there. I'll just make it easy: it's almost laughably close to how YouTube's bitrate at 480p is.

I've watched DVDs on my 2160p set downstairs and even when deinterlaced and upscaled by the DVD player to 720p, they look impressively watchable.

[Thanatopsis]

So just to give some post production background on netflix and content delivery to them.  As of 2017/2018 video files were required to be delivered to Netflix as Proress 422 or Prores 422 HQ files in their original resolution.   Netflix did not want production houses to do any post processing or upscaling to the delivered files.

 

From that experiance it has been my running hypothesis that netflix is not scaling any video on their servers but instead trying to get your streaming device to do it instead as my entire experiance with them seems to focus on them trying to keep bandwith down on the streaming to client end.