360 to offer DVD upscaling to 720p

I bought this one a Momitsu V330N about 2 months ago.
I use it primarilly as a network player, but it also upconverts DVD through component.

 

Huh, looks like those are hard to find:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Momitsu+V330N+&btnG=Search

 

I clicked on the link, the quote says:

"Watch your DVD movies in glorious 480p from the get go."

I guess they changed it?

 

When was the model first released though? I know when I was looking for one about 18 months ago, Momitsu came up again and again, but I can't remember if that was the model (probably not, but I wonder if it came out around the same time..I remember being told at the time not to expect any more such players because of the MPAA's distaste for it).

Anyway, mystery solved, MS has corrected the page as pointed out above.

 

Yep, looks like the 360s DVD playing ablites aren't going to be worth talking about much at all.

 

Wrong model number should have been 880 - http://www.momitsu.com/dvd_880n.html

 

Don't most TV's upscale anyways? My TV upscales everything to 1080i, so why would MS's(or an DVD players) upscaling be any better than my Hitachi built-in scaler?

 

Because the DVD player can scale while in the digital domain. If you are feeding your TV the signal via component, the digital source on thd DVD is being converted to analog and the TV's scaler is converting back to digital for the upconversion. Each D -> A , A -> D conversion loses data! C'mon, I thought this was a technical forum!

 

True, the real question is could you see the difference with your own eyes.

BTW, anyone who really wants 720p dvd player can pick up a modded xbox, install XBMC and have all your dvd's upscaled to 720p.

I don't notice a difference between 480pD > 720pD > 1080iA and 480p>1080iA

When I get home I'm gonna do a splitscreen comparison, one feed from my XBOX at 720p upscaled, and the other from my standalone DVD player @ 480p, both upscaled to 1080i, and I'll see if there's any real difference.

 

I think it depends on the source and perhaps what you are viewing on, but my experience with ffdshow on PC has been very very good. I remember taking screengrabs for a HT forum to illustrate the difference just of upscaling, with for example The Lord of the Rings. Asides from just generally being sharper, upscaling yielded much finer detail in certain scenes, things like hair and even the weave on clothes etc. Some DVDs there's little difference, and in fact things can be made worse if it's a very noisy transfer. But all-in-all, I think it's very nice to be able to do it.

 

I was goinig to say who cares you can't pull detail out of thin air if it's not there at 480p it's not going to e there at any resolution, it's just not possible. It could upconvert it 99999x99999 and it won't do 99% any good while this may be nice for some projector users(super big screens 70in and up) it's pretty pointless for the every day HDTV user in my experience. Yss I have a DVD player that will output at 108i and 720p.(sam HD930)

 

Have you not used those features on your DVD player or is it just not very good at it? The mouse-over pic on this page is a good example of what can be done with a decent software scaler and a bit of filtering:

http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=ffdshowdvd_1

 

i'm not convinced by screenshots on a PC, that doesn't really tell you whether the final image on your HDTV is going to look any better. The problem with that comparison is the 480p "before" image hasn't been upscaled to 1080i.

We need to see a comparison of a 480p analogue source upscaled to 1080i, compared to a 480p digital source upconverted to 720p analogue source, then upconverted AGAIN to 1080i.

I would bet there is no noticeable difference since they both end up at 1080i(or whatever your HD set is) anyways.

 

that's what I'm thinking.

It's going to look about the same (to me) when my TV is done with it (at 1080i) whether it was 480p or 720p from the DVD player.

 

I"m sorry but upscaling 480p VIDEO to anythng will not add detail it just doesn't work like that, like I said it will help if you ahvea a super big screen but thats about it. You can't add detail that isn't there if that were the case we wouldn't need HDDVD plpayers.

 

My TV upconverts (or downconverts depending on your viewpoint) 720P to 1080i.
And I can tell you there is a significant visual difference between the scaler in the TV and the one in the DVD player.

Running the DVD player at 720P scaled to 1080i in the TV vs 1080i on the DVD player, displayed natively on the TV provides an overall lower quality image.

High quality upscaling is actually a somewhat difficult problem.
But as with many things depends how picky you are. Very expensive TV sets will likely have better scalers than the one in my DVD player, and I might actually be better feeding it 480P (native DVD resolution).

 

My DVD refuses to scale over composite, my RX-Z9 receiver refuses to scale any composite input that has Macrovision or CGMS set.

I think the legality of the feature is a gray area, and some CE vendors are not taking any chances.

Remember, the DVD Forum struggled over the issue of even ALLOWING DVI output for 480i/p on DVD players.

 

Last I recall CSS regs. forbid upscaling through anything non-digital, so that does make sense.

 

I think someone from the TeamXbox forum emailed MS about 720p upscalling and MS said it was a typo.

Anyway regarding upscalling, some HTPC people swear by software scallers. Lanczos is a favorite algorithm for people trying to extract more detail from a DVD or Divx source (lanczos is only an option in ffdshow I think so maybe only with divx/xvid/...). I'm not saying it's not snake oil in a sense but it can increase preceived quality if only a little. I'd also much rather have software doing the scalling then hardware of anykind, strange that 720p scalled looks better then 1080i on my Sony CRT HDTV though, must be because I'm not using HDMI.