A DVD + BluRay player AND one that upscales footage?

[venomtail]

Got plenty of old DVD's and recently got gifted a huge set of like 20+ BluRay movies. My old DVD player is likely on its last legs as it's making weird noises from time to time + it'd like to watch my movies at 4K rather than the 1080p or whatever quality it is on old DVD's.

 

First question. How does DVD upscaling work? Multiple players I've seen that advertise such a feature that footage is upscaled to 4K live. What sort of upscaling is it? Is there a noticeable upgrade to normal DVD quality and how does it work.

As I am interested in that feature, are there any media players that can upscale my movies PLUS play both DVD and BluRay disks? Seems like either its DVD upscaling or bluray. Saw a different player that can play both DVD and BluRay but didn't have this "upscaling" technology.

 

Is it worth it or all just a bunch of marketing speak?

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, venomtail said:

How does DVD upscaling work

Usually it's just smoothing the image a bit and making some good guesses as to what pixels can be filled in with. Often ends up looking like crap tho.

 

That or it's literally just outputting a 4k signal but the original source is still at it's original resolution (dvds i max 576i). Which is the better way as it makes the image crisper but doesnt make it look bad.

 

the nvidia shield is one of the rare devices that actually does it good but thats only files and no discs.

 

If you want a cheap 4k bluray player that also upscales dvds without it looking bad an xbox one s or x can do both no problem and if you look on the used market a xbox one s is like 150$ max.

[venomtail]

9 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Usually it's just smoothing the image a bit and making some good guesses as to what pixels can be filled in with. Often ends up looking like crap tho.

 

That or it's literally just outputting a 4k signal but the original source is still at it's original resolution (dvds i max 576i). Which is the better way as it makes the image crisper but doesnt make it look bad.

 

the nvidia shield is one of the rare devices that actually does it good but thats only files and no discs.

 

If you want a cheap 4k bluray player that also upscales dvds without it looking bad an xbox one s or x can do both no problem and if you look on the used market a xbox one s is like 150$ max.

Was thinking of the PS3 scenario back when BluRay came out but never though the same situation could apply now.

 

So Xbox S has bluray, dvd  AND it upscales footage in some way to 4K?

[An0maly_76]

I have yet to try it with my new BDR212-DBK (and all my movies are standard DVD at this time), but I've gotten excellent results recording at 9500kbps in OBS, then processing the raw recording through NCH's VideoPad, though I'm looking for a better solution, VideoPad's interface is a bit cumbersome for me.

[emosun]

Your tv does the upscaling not the device

[Blue4130]

5 hours ago, emosun said:

Your tv does the upscaling not the device

The device can also do the upscale, depending on your setup. 

[jaslion]

9 hours ago, venomtail said:

Was thinking of the PS3 scenario back when BluRay came out but never though the same situation could apply now.

 

So Xbox S has bluray, dvd  AND it upscales footage in some way to 4K?

The xbox will output at whatever res you put it at that it supports. It will then shoe the medis in native res BUT fur to running at the resolution of the tv it will be sharper and clearer. This is the non invasive kind of upscaling youd want.

 

Bluray player are still very expensive and they are technically a little better at displaying uray content but its so minimal you dont notice

[dalekphalm]

11 hours ago, venomtail said:

Got plenty of old DVD's and recently got gifted a huge set of like 20+ BluRay movies. My old DVD player is likely on its last legs as it's making weird noises from time to time

 

11 hours ago, venomtail said:

+ it'd like to watch my movies at 4K

 

11 hours ago, venomtail said:

rather than the 1080p or whatever quality it is on old DVD's.

Heh - DVD's are 480p, not 1080p. That's for NTSC (North American) DVD's mind you. PAL (European) DVD's were a slightly higher resolution.

11 hours ago, venomtail said:

First question. How does DVD upscaling work? Multiple players I've seen that advertise such a feature that footage is upscaled to 4K live. What sort of upscaling is it? Is there a noticeable upgrade to normal DVD quality and how does it work.

Upscaling can work in a few different ways, but the basic form is just taking each pixel and quadrupling it. More advanced methods try to guess what the missing pixels might look like. Results are varied.

11 hours ago, venomtail said:

As I am interested in that feature, are there any media players that can upscale my movies PLUS play both DVD and BluRay disks? Seems like either its DVD upscaling or bluray. Saw a different player that can play both DVD and BluRay but didn't have this "upscaling" technology.

 

Is it worth it or all just a bunch of marketing speak?

I use an Xbox One S for my Blu-Ray player. It has a 4K Blu-Ray drive, which is backwards compatible with standard Blu-Rays (1080p) and DVD's (480p). DVD upscaling looks alright. 1080p upscaling is not very noticeable because even on a 4K TV, 1080p Blu-Rays still look pretty damn good.

 

Xbox One S's are fairly cheap to buy new, but you can also find tons of them used for a good discount.

 

Bonus points is that the One S is an excellent Streaming Box for things like YouTube, Netflix, D+, Prime Video, etc - or even Plex. And that's not even considering gaming, if you don't care about gaming.

[venomtail]

5 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Heh - DVD's are 480p, not 1080p. That's for NTSC (North American) DVD's mind you. PAL (European) DVD's were a slightly higher resolution.

Upscaling can work in a few different ways, but the basic form is just taking each pixel and quadrupling it. More advanced methods try to guess what the missing pixels might look like. Results are varied.

I use an Xbox One S for my Blu-Ray player. It has a 4K Blu-Ray drive, which is backwards compatible with standard Blu-Rays (1080p) and DVD's (480p). DVD upscaling looks alright. 1080p upscaling is not very noticeable because even on a 4K TV, 1080p Blu-Rays still look pretty damn good.

 

Xbox One S's are fairly cheap to buy new, but you can also find tons of them used for a good discount.

 

Bonus points is that the One S is an excellent Streaming Box for things like YouTube, Netflix, D+, Prime Video, etc - or even Plex. And that's not even considering gaming, if you don't care about gaming.

Xbox S might be the go to choice for this. Used ones are pretty cheap as well at around £80. Can do everything I need for movies and maybe even games for the family now.

 

For the upscaling, is it good? Side note, does xbox support streaming like Steam remote play? Would save me a lot of headaches.

[dalekphalm]

7 hours ago, venomtail said:

Xbox S might be the go to choice for this. Used ones are pretty cheap as well at around £80. Can do everything I need for movies and maybe even games for the family now.

 

For the upscaling, is it good? Side note, does xbox support streaming like Steam remote play? Would save me a lot of headaches.

The upscaling is good but not great.

 

DVD's (especially if on a 4K TV) will look noticeably worse than a 1080p Blu-Ray, but they still look pretty decent.

 

As for Steam Remote Play, I don't think it supports that. There is a built-in Wireless Display app though, which mirrors your PC's screen. No idea how well it works as I've never used it.

[tikker]

On 9/15/2022 at 5:00 PM, venomtail said:

First question. How does DVD upscaling work?

Depends on how it is implemented. A simple example is to take a 1920x1080 pixel image, literally duplicate every pixel horizontally and vertically et voila you have a 3840x2160 pixel 4k image. As you may guess, the resulting image will look identical, bar maybe less blocky on larger screens, because nothing has been changed about the actual content of the image. To do a bit better you can interpolate things to guess what should be there. For example, if your low resolution "image" is the sequence [1, 5] you can interpolate that to [1, 3, 5] or [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] to create smoother transition between colours. That can look better, but can't recreate fine detail that was lost due to lack of resolution. Then you have the fancy AI-driven methods that have been trained on reference material to better guess what a more detailed version of something would look like.

 

In all cases the quality of the output will depend on the input. Low resolution or lesser quality material will not upscale as well as better qualtiy footage and you can't realistically expect to get amazing 4k image quality out of 480p input material simply because so much information is likely not there. I am not aware of any DVD/Blu-ray player with AI upscaling.

 

It can help, but don't expect your DVDs to suddenly look anything like their remastered 4k brothers. In other words: I wouldn't really worry about it.

[rrats]

You can improve the quality of a DVD by ripping it onto a pc and setting up a few parameters in VirtualDub. If the DVD was telecined and not interlaced with it you could pretty much get a constant 480/576 vertical pixel quality

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, rrats said:

You can improve the quality of a DVD by ripping it onto a pc and setting up a few parameters in VirtualDub. If the DVD was telecined and not interlaced with it you could pretty much get a constant 480/576 vertical pixel quality

That's standard DVD quality, how does VirtualDub improve the quality? Sharpening? 

[rrats]

Detelecining NTSC films or not deinterlacing PAL films can improve the video quality since most DVD players deinterlace everything regardless of the content.

16 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

That's standard DVD quality, how does VirtualDub improve the quality? Sharpening? 

 

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, rrats said:

Detelecining NTSC films or not deinterlacing PAL films can improve the video quality since most DVD players deinterlace everything regardless of the content.

 

Are dvd's telecined or interlaced? I don't see why they would be unless the source was grabbed from broadcast. I have hundreds of dvd's and I can't think of any that are not true 480p.

[rrats]

Tv recordings of live broadcasts and stuff filmed on video are interlaced.

 

Films that have been in theatres and some TV series as well as anime are generally telecined

[dilpickle]

Kinda pointless to put this much effort into upscaling a decades old format. A decent 4K TV will have as good a upscaling as is needed. Anything else is putting lipstick on a pig.

[IPD]

I would not underestimate the value of one of these for post-processing.  Marseille is very highly regarded in the retro-gaming community. 

 

https://www.marseilleinc.com/cinema-edition/

[venomtail]

On 9/25/2022 at 11:22 AM, rrats said:

You can improve the quality of a DVD by ripping it onto a pc and setting up a few parameters in VirtualDub. If the DVD was telecined and not interlaced with it you could pretty much get a constant 480/576 vertical pixel quality

That's not a scalable solution I can manage. More of an if there's an unplanned movie night or we/I want to want multiple movies in one night I can't realistically prepare said movies. Something automatic real-time is really all I'm looking for and all I can be bothered to do.

 

I'll look into other solutions but the Xbox Series might be a good one. Fairy cheap and my TV is just a cheap shit 4k one but 4k non the less so pretty sure it doesn't have any built in upscaler.

[rrats]

In that case just use a DVD player it should do the job ok I mean you can't really generate details out of nowhere

[tikker]

On 9/30/2022 at 9:30 AM, venomtail said:

I'll look into other solutions but the Xbox Series might be a good one. Fairy cheap and my TV is just a cheap shit 4k one but 4k non the less so pretty sure it doesn't have any built in upscaler.

It likely has. Otherwise cable TV or anything else that is not 4k will have a lot of black surrounding it. Even 1080p only fills 25% of the number of pixels on a 3840x2160 display.

 

Just make sure to temper your expectations, and honestly not think too hard about it. Upscaling can't recreate lost detail. A 480p image upscaled to 2160p will not be more than, at best, an interpolated 480p image. A machine learning-based algorithm may be able to use the image context to guesstimate and recover some details, but that's about it. Upscaling from 720x480 to 3840x2160 is increasing the amount of pixels by (3840/720) * (2160/480), or almost 24 times. Even with pristine 480p source material that is a huge ask.