Upscaling SD content - which is better?

jaydeeuk1

About to order the Sony Bravia 40V4000 40" LCD 1080p etc for living room, and build myself a media center. I have Sky at mo, but will cancel contract and use the free to air channels which include a few HD ones, and the media center will have a blu ray / hd dvd drive too.
A lot of content however will still be in SD format, inc DVDs so heres the question.

Would the TV be better at upscaling the picture (ie, use a native desktop resolution for DVD and send over HDMI for the TV to do its magic) or have the desktop set at 1920 1080 and have software upscale the DVD / SD tv content? And if so, which software do you recommend?

I've seen a couple of excellent DVD upscalers, but was wondering if software could do just as good a job.

I could probably answer the question myself when the TV arrives in the next 5 days, but I'm impatient

Cheers.

[Deleted User]

The output of the computer will not be influenced by whatever resolution you set your monitor too

Conor_3

Just buy a Playstation 3. Does an excellent job of upscaling, has a built in Blu-Ray player, can read memory cards from cameras as well as USB sticks, can act as a media center and with the new PlayTV add on, can act as a twin tuner freeview PVR. I'd swap out the hard drive for a bigger one though and Sony even tell you how to.

In addition to that, you can install Linux on a PS3 and have a fully functioning computer as well.

aliEnRIK

As Conor said. The PS3 is pretty damn good
HOWEVER, my pioneer tv has a far better internal scaler and so its best for me to watch in SD and have the inbuilt scaler upscaling instead of the player
Its tv dependant really

Domokun

Set the resolution of your computer to the native resolution of the TV. Look over to AVforums for upscaling program advice, you're looking for a setup that uses FFDSHOW.

donnajunkie

i presume a hd tv only upscales sd pictures if they are coming through a hdmi slot?

do sky hd boxes still have a scart out slot as well as the hdmi out slot so that you can connect it to a vcr or a dvd recorder? would you still get 2 hours onto a dvd disc in the standard recording mode on a dvd recorder if you are recording from a hd channel?

aliEnRIK

donnajunkie wrote: »

i presume a hd tv only upscales sd pictures if they are coming through a hdmi slot?

Nope. Anything that fits the screen is scaled. Be it down hdmi, scart or whatever, even inbuilt freeview

Marty999

donnajunkie wrote: »

do sky hd boxes still have a scart out slot as well as the hdmi out slot so that you can connect it to a vcr or a dvd recorder? would you still get 2 hours onto a dvd disc in the standard recording mode on a dvd recorder if you are recording from a hd channel?

Yes you are correct on both counts.

donnajunkie

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Nope. Anything that fits the screen is scaled. Be it down hdmi, scart or whatever, even inbuilt freeview

on our current and previous tv the impression is that only pictures through the hdmi/component slots are hd or upscaled sd pictures. there doesnt seem to be any difference with pictures through the scart slots.

aliEnRIK

donnajunkie wrote: »

on our current and previous tv the impression is that only pictures through the hdmi/component slots are hd or upscaled sd pictures. there doesnt seem to be any difference with pictures through the scart slots.

Probably due to using poor scart leads (Which will confuse the scaling software)

But the sheer fact it FITS the WHOLE screen means its scaled. If it wasnt scaled, it would have borders all around the pictures inches wide.

superscaper

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Probably due to using poor scart leads (Which will confuse the scaling software)

But the sheer fact it FITS the WHOLE screen means its scaled. If it wasnt scaled, it would have borders all around the pictures inches wide.

Actually no, upscaling means that it upscales the resolution not whether it fills the entire screen. It can still fill the entire screen but not be high definition. Upscaling means interpolating the standard definition pixels to get a high definition number of pixels. Simply inputting a standard definition source into a HD TV does not upscale it. Scaling can mean the size of a picture but in this context it's about resolution only.

If you want an SD source (such as DVD) to be upscaled on a HD TV then you need something to process the upscaling and calculate that interpolation to get pseudo HD, otherwise it's still just an SD display. Simply filling the screen is not upscaling.