Vista Upscaling DVD and DVDRips to HD

milfner · **18th April 2009, 11:00 PM**

My PS3 upscales DVD and video to HD. I know its not as good as the original blu ray discs, but it still looks a lot better than the original DVD....How do you accomplish this with a HTPC with DVD's and DVDRips??? I use Media Centre, I heard that ffdshow does this but it doesnt work in MC, so I need something for MC. I have also heard about SIMHD by Arcsoft but I do not have nvidia i have ATI radeon....

lillgreen · **19th April 2009, 08:31 PM**

The new version of powerdvd9 is supposed to upscale dvd's.
And ATI is supported.

milfner · **19th April 2009, 11:52 PM**

I use Windows Media Centre to play DVD's and DVDRips....So how will this work?

lillgreen · **20th April 2009, 01:28 PM**

You could use a movie collection plugin to launch it as an external program to play the dvd.
I have heard that the new powerdvd intergration is pretty good.

djorkboy · **21st April 2009, 04:01 PM**

Maybe I'm ignorant, but doesn't Media Centre already upscale?

My Media Centre sends it's signal to my television at 720p so anything I play, even a 640x480 mov file is, strictly speaking, being upscaled to 720p.

Is this the case or is there something more to "upscaling" that I don't know about?

philzgr8 · **21st April 2009, 04:03 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by djorkboy

Maybe I'm ignorant, but doesn't Media Centre already upscale?

My Media Centre sends it's signal to my television at 720p so anything I play, even a 640x480 mov file is, strictly speaking, being upscaled to 720p.

Is this the case or is there something more to "upscaling" that I don't know about?

Quite correct. The only possible difference is the quality of the engine doing the upscaling.

logifuse · **21st April 2009, 04:47 PM**

For example, if you use FFDShow's upscaling & post processing on a 350MB AVI & then compare it with the same file with all the FFDShow options switched off, you'll see a massive difference despite the fact that they're both being displayed at 720p.

The improvement with DVDs wouldn't be as big, but it's potentially significant. The problem with VMC is that it (VMC) can't be set for different decoders for TV & DVD, meaning whatever you set up for DVD needs to work properly with both SD & HD TV (& it usually won't).

Justin

dgaust · **21st April 2009, 04:54 PM**

You can use Mediacontrol to add ffdshow postprocessing & resizing to DVD playback in VMC though.

Personally I haven't used it, as given I only have a 720p TV it isn't really worth it (DVDs still look good). But the postprocessing/resizing capabilities on AVIs and the like is pretty good.