[Ayla]

Hi,


I'm new to the whole HTPC thing and have a couple of questions.


Do you use Dscaler when playing DVD on your HTPC... how ?


Or du you just set your HTPC's resolution to that of your projector, use a VGA-VGA cable from the graphic card output to the VGA input in the projector and play the DVD in eg. PowerDVD and that's it?


If yes, where is deinterlacing being done and what is the optimal setting of the refresh rates in Powerstrip for a XGA LCD?


Thanks,

Martin

 

[jkaiser]

The short answer is no.


Almost all of the software DVD players do not scale, its the video card that does the actual scaling. They do sometimes have selections on aspect ratios.


DScaller works by take input from a video capture card and performs the scaling on that. To do as you asked would require 2 htpcs (assuming a software DVD player and not an external DVD player.) One to play the DVD and the other to scale the image, and probably would not look very good.


There is a relatively new player here called Zoom Player that in addition to playing DVDs also scales. I have not tried this player so I can not confirm this. I also understand from some of the posts that it may not be for the faint of heart.


Do a search in this forum for some of these keywords and you should find more information. DScaler, ZoomPlayer,

 

[Gary McCoy]

DScaler is an application program that controls and operates a TV tuner capture card. It allows you to tune in TV signals from cable or TV antenna, and does a very good job "deinterlacing" such signals for a "progressive" display like a computer monitor, projector, or even an HD-ready RPTV monitor. Also, it will allow you to select the auxilliary video inputs of such cards (if present) and deinterlace VHS, S-VHS, Laserdisk, and other analog video signals.


DVDs, however, are digital sources. The HTPC will do an excellant job on them, but the software used would be a DVD player application, and the data would be read by a DVD-ROM drive inside the HTPC. The DVD "deinterlacing" would then be in the digital domain, it would be a poor choice to import analog DVD images from an external standalone DVD player, then deinterlace them digitally with DScaler.


With either of these PC applications, the scaling to native projector resolution would be done bt the HTPC video board.


Someday we may have DScaler support for SDI digital video inputs - the Forum thread below applies to that topic:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...SDI+input+HTPC


Gary