[ale] Using Linux as an Upconverting DVD player?

[aaron]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 09:56, Ned Williams wrote:
> Greetings Ale'ers.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone know of a way to use Linux as an upconverting DVD
> player? Obviously reading a DVD is a no brainer, playing it through one of
> the many players is also easy. But I never have heard of anyone doing the
> upconversion processer from 480i/p to any of the larger HDTV resolutions?
> Anyone know of a project doing this?
> 
> thanks
> Ned

Relevant as it may be to want to do the suggested "up-conversions" from 
standard res video with Linux based tools, I'm not sure that there is really 
much point to taking the time and effort. The end result of any scaling 
process for bitmapped material** can never exceed the original resolution, 
and it won't matter if you use 4 or 16 or 256 little blocks to fill the space 
of the original big block, you still just get one big block for a 
proportional area of the image (with a whole lot more overhead to display 
it).  Further, DVD material is about the worst possible standard res starting 
point for any conversion, since it is absurdly over-compressed and resolution 
compromised. As much as 90% of the originating data has already been 
discarded and the images are made still blockier by the nature of the lossy, 
"*peg" type algorithms (a class which encompasses most mainstream image & 
video compression technologies).

I'm sure there are those who will argue that interpolating into more pixels 
(aka bigger) will equate to better, but the viewpoint above is offered from 
the vantage of 25 years of work in various forms of electronic imagery, 
computer graphics, video and multimedia.

peace
aaron

**Almost all common graphics and video delivery formats are fixed resolution 
bitmaps.