Upscaling can it be done when you rip by going DVDs to H.264

Sure, you can use resize and use some of the avisynth plugins and get decent quality upconversion. But the question is: Is it worth the space when a good quality video card can do a similar job on the fly?

Vocab lesson:

ripping - taking bits of data off of a disc (DVD or BR)
transcoding - converting from one video/audio format to another (i.e. - MPEG2 to H264)
scaling - changing the resolution of a video

In your case you have a DVD and likely an HDTV that does 1080p. The DVD is at best 480p in the MPEG2 video format. If you transcode the video to H264, it will take less space given the nature of H264 being better at compression. You could also upscale the video at that point, but it would take more disk space and not look any better than if you let the video card to the upscaling as you played back the file.

Chanced are you ahve your video card set to output @ your TVs highest resolution (1080p in this case). So, whenever you play anything that is not 1080p, your video will upscale it to that resolution (quite well I might add).

Theortically, you can set up AVIsynth scripts that will "clean up" and upscale the DVD image, and if they are so compute heavy that your computer can not do them in real time (would cause stuttering during playback) then you can do them during the encode step.

It might even be possible to filter/scale the DVD so well that it overcomes the hit you take when re-encoding it to H264.

The question is, is it worth it? Personally, I don't think so. Not when you can just watch the Blu Ray of it and be much better off.

-Suntan