I saw a PS3 yesterday play a Blu-Ray of the latest Bond film onto a 768 line plasma.

I also saw it upscale a DVD of the same movie on the same screen.

When I got home I played my DVD of this movie on my n-Vi on my 1080P panel (which is fed 576P component and does the upscaling itself).

The DVD on my system look appreciably better than the (admittedly pretty good) DVD picture from the PS3

Interestingly though, there was little about the blu-ray picture that would entice me toward buying an additional player and duplicating my software into a new format... although I will reserve full judgement until I see this showing on a full HD panel with no downscaling involved.

DVD - as obsolete as CD, vinyl & nuclear power.

Perhaps much of this debate stems from the fact that we, as consumers, are constantly inundated with suggestions that we should trade-up to new technology with better specifications, when in fact there is no substantial reason to do so based on considerations of performance.

In the case of scaling/de-interlacing, typical 480i/60 DVD source material will be decoded from MPEG-2, transcoded to RGB or Y'PbPr from YCb(Cr), and de-interlaced to 480p/60 (or transcoded to 576p/50).

Then the signal hits any video switching or on-screen overlays generated by an AV receiver, with the effects of any circuitry or processing within tht receiver.

Finally the signal hits the display device–if the (fixed–pixel) display device is natively 480p/60, then this presents an ideal situation–but few devices are, and the aspect ratio may be different; hence the image gets processed again to fill the screen at some non-integer resolution, including video overlays. (An analog CRT need not have these problems, relative to its own design issues as regards geometry, convergence or video bandwidth.)

If the display itself has some way of receiving a native signal of the exact frame rate and resolution, especially in the digital domain (say, over DVI or HDMI), then an outboard scaler makes sense, as its processing will likely be better than the display's built-in processing. (In most cases, best results would be obtained using a low-tech, obsolete 480i signal, as the scaler would also handle de-interlacing duties, rather than the DVD player.)

Moving the scaler into the source player makes sense, if the processing power exists within the machine to scale and de-interlace well. However, if there exists no way around the built-in processing of the display, the benefits would be significantly less (though non-zero). As this is the case with many fixed-pixel displays (especially plasmas), sadly, this really constrains the potential performance advantages of high-quality video processing.

So the real question becomes–how good could a built-in scaler for the DVD5 or n-Vi be (or, for that matter any other 480p DVD player + scaler combination), even output at native panel resolution, if the display device (LCD panel, plasma panel, DLP projector) re-processes the signal?

Ultimately, this will vary from combination of display device and source player–but it does pose some very interesting problems for optimizing the performance of a 4:2:0 MPEG-2 source stream through a variety of processing and rendering stages....

I agree with just about all you say Dave but I would say that most of what you describe are the problems encountered in your typical, run-of-the-mill, non-enthusiast type setups. Passing the video signal through AV receivers, plasma displays that won't accept native rate inputs - if this kind of scenario was an audio system, we'd be talking about your typical mid to lo-fi Denon, Sony type system.

What about the DVD5 user who wants a home-cinema system that has the equivalent attention to detail and careful choice of components as you'd find in a Naim audio system? I suspect what you are saying is if you want a high quality scaler for the DVD5 and you have the rest of the system to match, there are good quality external box solutions out there. This, by the way is exactly what I've done and totally avoids all the problems you describe. I have a DVD player with a good quality MPEG decoder (Arcam FMJ machine) which has been modified to grab the interlaced signal directly off the output of the MPEG decoder chip before the DVD player has chance to mess with it. This raw video signal is sent via SDI to a DVDO VP50 video processor which does the de-interlacing, inverse telecine conversion and scaling, then sends this digitaly to a DLP projector that can accept a native rate input (without re-processing) at a 24Hz multiple.

Allan

Yes, the inverse telecine conversion is pretty important, especially for your side of the pond where judder and a 50Hz domestic scan rate make for interesting problems. Over here, there are a variety of 120Hz scan-rate displays/projectors making their way onto the market.

However, the SDI option, on a commercially-shipping domestic DVD player, is a non-starter due to issues with copy protection–but I'm a big supporter of "releasing" the primordial MPEG streams out into the world, to be decoded locally by a video processing engine tuned specifically for the display at hand....perhaps we'll see more of this sensible approach at time passes.

quote:

Originally posted by Mike1380:
I saw a PS3 yesterday play a Blu-Ray of the latest Bond film onto a 768 line plasma.

I also saw it upscale a DVD of the same movie on the same screen.

When I got home I played my DVD of this movie on my n-Vi on my 1080P panel (which is fed 576P component and does the upscaling itself).

The DVD on my system look appreciably better than the (admittedly pretty good) DVD picture from the PS3

Interestingly though, there was little about the blu-ray picture that would entice me toward buying an additional player and duplicating my software into a new format... although I will reserve full judgement until I see this showing on a full HD panel with no downscaling involved.

DVD - as obsolete as CD, vinyl & nuclear power.

The issue is that your comparison is not an exact A&B comparison. The variable is the TV sets. They are different. Nuclear power is already obsolete? What planet are you living on?

Sense of humor alert.

Maybe not A-B.... but at least I did see ALL of them, same footage, with my own eyes... that's good enough for me.

I'm from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.........

To quote another chap from my world..."I'm sorry, they don't have sarcasm where I come from."

here's a bit of humour.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYvZnTFpip0&eurl=http%3A...%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F

made me laugh anyway

neil

At http://www.areadvd.de/index2.html (german) they made some tests at 04.06. and found the PS3 1.8 to be at a level very close to a Denon DVD-2930 in picture quality.

Upscaling also often helps to better overscan problems. Most picture devices do big overscans on analogue SD inputs. Some get considerably less or no overscan when you use the digital input with HD, ideally pre-scaled to the native resolution of the device.

I d'like to have an "as straight through as possible" signal path too. Shame that SDI is only a studio standard. Hollywood fears everything without copy protection more than the devil the holy water. This multiple fiddling around with the signal does more harm than better it...

My eyes and ears are also obsolete analogue technology but still they serve me very well!

Adrian

quote:

Originally posted by Adrian Frauchiger:
At http://www.areadvd.de/index2.html (german) they made some tests at 04.06. and found the PS3 1.8 to be at a level very close to a Denon DVD-2930 in picture quality.

Upscaling also often helps to better overscan problems. Most picture devices do big overscans on analogue SD inputs. Some get considerably less or no overscan when you use the digital input with HD, ideally pre-scaled to the native resolution of the device.

I d'like to have an "as straight through as possible" signal path too. Shame that SDI is only a studio standard. Hollywood fears everything without copy protection more than the devil the holy water. This multiple fiddling around with the signal does more harm than better it...

My eyes and ears are also obsolete analogue technology but still they serve me very well!

Adrian

smile... and the DVD-2930 is one of the best at its price range.