[systemlayers]

I've always wondered as receivers, blu-ray players and video processors get marketed as having 'upscaling/doing edge sharpening/etc' for SD/under 1080p content.. how does software processing compare? I've fiddled a bit with FFDshow settings in the past but sometimes run into cpu limitations etc. Does anyone with experience know how a properly configured software player in an HTPC compares to the hardware processing of say a BDP-103? I haven't been able to find much great information about this and almost want to run a comparison myself if I aquire the BDP-103.

 

[Sammy2]

Under some circumstances it is better to get a discrete GPU and utilize hardware acceleration. That said though, the current software processing looks pretty darn good, depending on which player and renderer you are using.

 

[systemlayers]

I mostly meant SD material scaled and enhanced on an HTPC with software tools V.S the dedicated hardware units like the OPPO blu-ray players. I was asking if with a well setup player if it could beat the image quality of the OPPO upscaling a dvd for instance?

 

[Sammy2]

I use MPC-HC with madVR for scaling and deinterlacing with h/w decoding (CUDA via nVidia GT 430). It works very well. As far as s/w decoding goes I cannot report as I don't use it.