Best upscaling software DVD player

It is your video card that does the work of upscaling since it is fed the 720x480 DVD frames coming from the Decoder. The Decoder is ony involved in de-decoding, de-interlacing and applying motion compensatin to non film DVDs with the assistance of the firmware acceleration functions iin the video card. You have to realize that taking a 700x480 DVD frame which is 400k in size and creating a 1920x1080 frame for your WUGA monitor or 1080p TV which is 2.1 Meg in size requires the invention of the 1700 additional pixels. The networks use upscaling hardware systems costing thousands of $ to do this when they are trasmittin SD programs over the HD digital channels which is why there upscaling looks a lot better than that done by and inexpensive video card.

The upscaling "work" is done by the cpu not the videocard. Why 1920x1080p though? Is that the native res of your display? If not then go with the lower, native res of the display. I've tested native and scaling above native then back to native after. Just going directly to native gives the best results.

When does the CPU do the up scaling if your are not using a program such as FFDSHOW or Zoom player to do it for you? If you ask a video card driver to output an image such as an extended desktop at two different resolutions to two different displays does that mean that the O/S sends the video at two differnet resolutions to the card independtly of each other?

True. I assumed you meant good scaling using ffdshow for Lanczos type scaling. If you just run dvd player software with your desktop set to 1920x1080 then the videocard uses bicubic scaling, which is quite poor compared to lanczos.


A great feature videocard makers could add is hardware lanczos scaling. Then we could drop ffdshow and use DXVA again.

Thanks guys for the info. Hmmmm, well since I don't need a bunch of bells and whistles maybe I can revisit FFDSHOW and see if I can't just us it to resize with Lanczos. Doubtful but I will try.


Guess there is no point in getting the latest version of a software DVD player then since it's videocard dependent.


Tim Huey

...very unlikely that'll work, I'm using AthlonXP 2700+ and a 6600gt 128mb vid card and I can't upscale to a smooth running motion while using ffdshow, my cpu is not up to par for the job imo

My desktop has Dual Athlon 2800+ processors and even it can't handle FFDSHOW.


Tim Huey

 you've made a point there Tim, anyway with the new HD-dvd format FFDshow will be a thing of the past, BTW there's a good guide on HTPC news about setting up ffdshow for those interested...

Thanks for the links Ted, maybe I need a bit more practice in tweaking FFDSHOW, I'll be doing just that and will post the results, good thread!