Re: Is Oppo the way to go?

On 7 May 2008 04:39:31 GMT phil-news-nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
| On Wed, 07 May 2008 00:54:31 GMT Fishface <invalid@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
| | Theodore Bundy wrote:
| | 
| |>I want to get an upconverting DVD player that will play DVD+R discs.
| |> Reading reviews seems to cite the Oppo as doing the best job.  Any
| |> thoughts on competing products?  TIA.
| | 
| | I don't know, but the cheap upconverting Sony I got at Costco for half
| | the price looks fine to me and came with an HDMI cable.  Only
upconverts
| | via the HDMI connection. 
| 
| And what will an HD TV do if it gets video that is NOT upconverted?

Now that I have asked the question and seen some answers, I will explain
why
I asked it.

I would hope every TV will do the upconversion, at least in geometry. 
There
is rumor some won't.  That's a strange scenario:  do people want those SD
pictures in a small box in the middle of the screen?  I don't think so.

So why do it in the DVD player?

1.  Maybe some TVs don't upconvert at all (a 480 line picture lights up
480
    of the lines of the display).

2.  Maybe some TVs do the upconversion incompletely by converting a 480
line
    picture only up to 960 lines on a 1080 display.

3.  Maybe some TVs do the upconversion poorly and end up with jaggies or
    twitter effects, or maybe just look fuzzy.

4.  Maybe some TVs have problems with the transition to a SD signal on one
of
    the inputs after displaying an HD signal on another.

5.  It's another marketing gimmic.

6.  And here is the biggie:

A DVD player actually has an _op****tunity_ to do the upconversion better.
This is because it has the original MPEG DCT coded data block.  These
blocks
are normally an 8x8 pixel area of the picture.  But, the DCT data does not
represent individual pixels.  Instead, it represents various gradients of
that ****tion of the picture.  It is not only possible to convert an 8x8
DCT
block into an 18x18 pixel array directly, you actually get a smoother
result.
While you won't get any new information that wasn't there to begin with,
you
can more easily get a better decoding and upconversion at the same time.

Some may think that a DVD player has to output 480i60 even if the DVD
content
is 480p24 (which, BTW, takes less space on the DVD, in addition to
matching
the original film).  However, on the analog component or HDMI outputs, it
can
do 480p24 natively.  But not many DVD players had that output originally.

I did say "op****tunity".  I do not know if they actually do it that way.
It is still possible that the upconversion _inside_ the DVD player is to
take the 480i60 or 480p24 content decoded from the disc and reconvert it
to
the selected format.

One area of shame is that TVs with a native 1366x768 LCD grid won't accept
video in a true 1366x768 format and display it exactly as-is.  If they
did,
then an upconversion DVD player could be programmed to do 1366x768 output
and bypass the _extra_ conversion in the TV, which should improve the
picture.

If ATSC had used the same picture coding (e.g. MPEG4) as DVDs, then it
would
also have been possible for the DVD player to simply pass the coded DCT
blocks
directly, unmodified, into the ATSC trans****t stream, and let the TV do
the
combination direct decoding and upconversion itself (not that they would,
but
they could).

I wonder if the ATSC MPEG2 decoding in TVs even tries to do direct decode
and
upconversion straight from the DCT to the native resolution ... or if it
just
decodes the ATSC to whatever raw video in the format transmitted and then
converts that.  I suspect the latter in most cases.

-- 
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