Software-only Upscaling?

March 26, 2008 9:59 AM

How can I "upscale" DVD/DivX video on my Windows PC and display it on the HDTV I've got setup as a second monitor?

Currently, when I play a DVD on my PC using either Windows Media Player or VLC and output it to my HDTV, it looks awful. As bad, if not worse, than SD programming. I've got to change the TV's aspect ratio to 4:3, or the video looks stretched. Either way, there's a lot of horizontal letterboxing and with the aspect ratio at 4:3, the actual video plays amid a sea of blackness.

Putting the DVD in my LG upscaling player, it fill the entire TV at 16:9 (and looks pretty good too). I want the media player software on my PC to do that. (With all the normal assumptions about the source material actually being 16:9, of course)

The box itself has a Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz processor, 3 GB of RAM and a GeForce 8800 so I'd think it can keep up with the decoding/transcoding/scaling. Doing some Google, I saw ffdshow come up a bit, but all the posts seemed to be at least 2 years old. Considering the rise in popularity of HDTVs, I figure this would be a relatively common thing folks who hook their PCs up to their TVs would want to do.

Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

posted by Nelsormensch to technology (7 comments total)

Simply playing the video in the second monitor fullscreen with whatever video player you normally use will work. All upscaling does is blow the image up to the native resolution of the display. When playing video on a computer the video card usually handles the job. Some players like VLC may have options to force software scaling with alternative algorithms, which may or may not look better.
posted by zsazsa at 10:10 AM on March 26, 2008

Ok, shame on me, I didn't read your question entirely. It sounds like you don't have the resolution set correctly on the HDTV. You need to find your HDTV's native resolution, and tell the Nvidia control panel to use that resolution for the HDTV.
posted by zsazsa at 10:13 AM on March 26, 2008

Yeah, first get the resolution of the HDTV right. Then comes the trickier part.

Some divx (or whatever codec) are 4:3 with black bars encoded with the video, so you get 16:9 video framed with black bars so it looks proper on a 4:3 screen.

The other videos do not include the black bars, so the player adds them in on a 4:3 display, and they disappear on a 16:9 display.

The second case is no problem, if the resolution is set correctly but the first case requires some messing about. In Media player classic (my default player), you need to right click, go to the Pan & Scan menu and the choose "zoom to 16:9" or something equivilent to that. In VLC you need to go to the Crop menu and choose a similar option. I am at work or I would get the exact menu location for you. If you set this right, it will crop out the encoded black bars and you should have a full screen non-distorted movie to watch!
posted by utsutsu at 10:24 AM on March 26, 2008

Is there a reason why you don't want to just play dvds on your dvd player, which also plays divx/xvid files? It looks like you can even dump videos to a portable hard drive and the dvd player will play them from the hard drive.

If you happen to have a ps3 as well, you can stream stuff from your pc to the ps3 over ethernet or wireless.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:44 AM on March 26, 2008

Great, thanks for the responses all. I initially set the TV to the highest resolution it would display, but I guess that wasn't quite right. I'll start by finding the TV's native resolution (any idea what's common on a mid-grade 720p 37" LCD TV, in case I can't find the documentation?) and go from there.

Is there a reason why you don't want to just play dvds on your dvd player, which also plays divx/xvid files? It looks like you can even dump videos to a portable hard drive and the dvd player will play them from the hard drive.

For simple DVDs, for sure, just dropping them in the player works. But I'm pretty short on physical shelf space and am considering ripping a bunch of movies (or more likely TV shows) to my PC, rich with disk, and then putting the boxes under the bed or somewhere else less accessible.

I've only tried playing two DivX files via USB, but neither of them looked very good. Plus, I don't have a portable HD and all my USB flash is relatively small. Going the portable HD route is definitely an option though, just not a free one, so I'll definitely keep that in mind for the future. Thanks!
posted by Nelsormensch at 12:58 PM on March 26, 2008

720p is 1280x720. That's probably the native resolution of your TV.
posted by aubilenon at 1:20 PM on March 26, 2008

Lots of "720p" lcds are actually 1366x768.

I've only tried playing two DivX files via USB, but neither of them looked very good.

Yah, but you shouldn't expect a 700MB two-hour movie to look great on a 37" screen. Watchable, but kinda ugly. Even if a movie is 2 700MB files, you're still taking the amount of information that normally holds an hour of audio and using it to hold an hour or two of video, and audio too.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:52 PM on March 26, 2008