Borg-HD: Upscaling DVD's to near HD quality?

HD disks have 2 big features, and a 3rd bonus one:

- better video resolution (1920x1080), and better color (bt.701)
- better sound, up to 7.1 channels

the bonus one is 24P output, which if your equipment supports it, is great at eliminating the 'judder' caused by 24fps films being displayed on 30/60fps devices. You notice it most on panning shots in movies where the camera moves from side to side, a slight stutter can be seen.

DVD's only have a 720x480 frame displayed at 30 fps, and up to 5.1 channels of audio. I can live with 5.1 audio, since thats all my receiver can handle, but the resolution and framerate need improvement, epspecially if you have a big screen TV, where the DVD image will be magnified 6x.

'Borg-HD' is a set of upscaling settings that I think greatly improve the output quality of standard DVD's, making them once again watchable on a big screen HDTV. I call it Borg-HD since it will evolve and 'assimilate' any other suggestions, techniques, or challengers :)

The 3 main areas it covers are:

- video resolution/size (480p -> 1080p)
- video color (gamma, colorspace)
- playback rate (24p from DVD)

The last one is only of real benefit for those that have 24hz displays, or some multiple of it (48/72/96/120hz), but can make a very noticable difference to the 'flow' or smoothness of the movie.

The frontend I use is 'Media Player Classic - HomeCinema Edition'. Its a great, simple player with a ton of built in filters, including everything needed to navigate and playback DVD's. The first 2 areas listed, video size and color, can be tweaked using 'FFDShow', another great swiss-army knife of codecs. The last, playback rate, will be handled by Dscaler IVTC, which can recover the 24p frames back from the DVD via inverse-telecine.

Stay tuned for the settings...

Toshiba XDE, and HTPC DVD Upscaling

Toshiba, having abandoned the HD market, have come up with an interesting 'tween' device for enhancing standard-def DVD's, the Toshiba XDE.

The XDE is rumoured to be based on 'super resolution' tech that has been around for a while, similar to supersampling, where extra resolution can be determined by looking at a series of frames before and after the current frame to be enhanced. The most common implmentation seems to be for upscaling 720x480 DVD res to 1440x960, 960P.

At first I didn't see the point, since HD DVD and Blu Ray are still the kings, but then realized not everything is going to be re-released in HD, or at least not for a long time, and some of us don't like the thought of rebuying movies, so this device will help bridge the gap. Early reports sound like it is the best upscaler to date, enhancing video quality, colour, and playback rate, 24P, which is common on HD players, but new to DVD.

Home Theater PC (HTPC) users have been playing around with different upscaling formulaes for a while now, and some of them really can compete or even exceed some upscaling dvd players on the market. I recently wanted to watch a DVD that isn't available in HD, so I thought I'd look into a better solution than my typical PowerDVD software, and roll my own upscaling chain...

Borg-HD was born.