Upscaling DVDs

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mailmarshall

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Topic # 11612 2-Feb-2007 08:49

Hi

Have a Sony Bravia S series (mark 2) and the Sony HDMI DVD Player (DVPNS76H). The problem is when I watch dvds at 720p or 1076i it feels liek the picture is moving at a slower speed than watching it on a normal CRT tv. The sound is all ok but the picture feels a bit slow.

Is this because the dvd i am watching is poor quality or is it that the upscaling means more processing and this is causing the picture to slow down?

It only hapens on certain dvds so I don't think its the dvd unit.

Any help appreciated.

richms

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Reply # 59660 2-Feb-2007 23:10

deinterlacing adds latency so that it can correct errors if it chooses the wrong mode to de-interlace, also some implementations look forward. If you are outputting 1080i you may also get the tv adding its own artifacts to it when it deinterlaces a second time.

Does it look any better to you when you upscale? If it does, then its probably just the obscene amount of edge enhancements that upscaling players apply to the signal to make it look better at a casual glance.

Chances are the variation you are seeing between source media is film vs video sourced stuff, possibly also some ntsc vs pal depending on where you got the stuff from too.

Richard rich.ms

cyril7

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Reply # 59672 3-Feb-2007 08:22

Why do you not expect some issues when you have piled layer upon layer of digital processing between the disc and your eyes.

Does the upsampling DVD players pictures look that much better than if you just fed 576i to the Bravia?, you cannot add something that just plainly aint there.

As richms said most upsampling DVD players add a heap of edge enhancement to make you think you are getting something for your efforts.

You panel is a 1366x768 unit, so why not feed analog component to the bravia and let it do a single spatial scaling from 720x576 to 1366x768. Before it does that it will naturally need to deinterlace.

By having your upscaling DVD player scale to say 1080i, it willl need to deinterlace, scale 720x576>1920x1080, then the Bravia will need to deinterlace that again, then rescale 1920x1080>1366x768. Each of these scaling has an associated filtering process that can only reduce information (remember it was a 720x576 when it started out) and add detail such as ringing and edge artifacts that werent in the original pic. Having the player output 720p may have less processes than 1080i, but still more than the direct process.

If you add to the fact that HDMI in its currrent incarnation is only 8bit, where as the DACs in your DVD player are most likely 10bit, and I seem to remember that the bravias have 10bit ADCs and 12bit processing, so why use hdmi and truncate things to 8bit?. Sure HDMI cuts out a DAC>ADC step, but if the DAC>ADC process is 12dB deeper than when you bypass it then maybe its not that bad after all.

In general I have found the optimal interconnect from DVD players is analog component, using interlace for PAL discs and progressive for NTSC ones. Pal disc have no flaging of progressive source fields (ie film) therefore there is no advantage to deinterlacing in the player, and many players will just Bob, where as the Bravia will adaptive deinterlace. NTSC discs however have flagged fields to assist 3:2pulldown, thus it is better to deinterlace NTSC material in the player where these flags can be utilised.

Cyril

lchiu7

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Reply # 59683 3-Feb-2007 09:46

..

In general I have found the optimal interconnect from DVD players is analog component, using interlace for PAL discs and progressive for NTSC ones. Pal disc have no flaging of progressive source fields (ie film) therefore there is no advantage to deinterlacing in the player, and many players will just Bob, where as the Bravia will adaptive deinterlace. NTSC discs however have flagged fields to assist 3:2pulldown, thus it is better to deinterlace NTSC material in the player where these flags can be utilised.

Cyril

Note that very few players upscale over component this being a restriction by the DVD Consortium (silly it seems to me). So if your player upscales better than your TV, than you must use HDMI

That being the case my Samsung DVD player has terrible black crush over HDMI so I just feed the TV component and let the TV scale the picture to its native resolution.

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grant_k

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Reply # 59689 3-Feb-2007 10:03

Gosh it's all so complicated now. Even though Mailmarshall has components from the same manufacturer (Sony) there are so many pitfalls for the unwary.

It was all so much easier when everything was 4:3 / 625i / end of story. Unless of course you imported a 525i NTSC tape or disc which always tended to look crappy anyway.

Hopefully by the time we build our new house with the space for a 42" or 50" TV, these issues will have sorted themselves out. For now, a 14" with composite out from MySky does the job, or we can watch DVDs on my PC's 19" monitor.

Thanks for sharing your wealth of knowledge Cyril7 and Ichiu7. As a veteran broadcasting tech from the late 70s / early 80s, this all comes as a bit of a revelation

Cheers,
Grant.

cyril7

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Reply # 59696 3-Feb-2007 10:59

Note that very few players upscale over component this being a restriction by the DVD Consortium (silly it seems to me). So if your player upscales better than your TV, than you must use HDMI

All players I know of will output 480p over analog component, the restriction you mention effects 720p/1080i. My point was that to effectively deinterlace NTSC material on a DVD it is helpfull to have the feild flags so to remove the out of sync field sequence that 24fps material on NTSC has. This can only be done by the player as the flags are not passed to the display. Thus a player will always produce better 480p than passing 480i to a panel and getting it to sort things out (this only applies to progressive/film source material). With PAL due to the 2:2 field/frame relationship of film material there is no advantage in using 576p, better to let the display sort it out.

Cyril

richms

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Reply # 59702 3-Feb-2007 12:43

The flags are worthless and ignored in most cases because they are often wrong on poorly mastered dvd's, which leads to major combing etc happening when it shouldnt. That may also be the OP's problem.

I have a few concert DVDs that have bad edits on them too, which screw my TV up for several frames after the edit. Thats what happens when you edit film sourced stuff on video however, so nothing you can really do.

Richard rich.ms

lchiu7

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Reply # 59709 3-Feb-2007 18:15

cyril7:
Note that very few players upscale over component this being a restriction by the DVD Consortium (silly it seems to me). So if your player upscales better than your TV, than you must use HDMI

All players I know of will output 480p over analog component, the restriction you mention effects 720p/1080i. My point was that to effectively deinterlace NTSC material on a DVD it is helpfull to have the feild flags so to remove the out of sync field sequence that 24fps material on NTSC has. This can only be done by the player as the flags are not passed to the display. Thus a player will always produce better 480p than passing 480i to a panel and getting it to sort things out (this only applies to progressive/film source material). With PAL due to the 2:2 field/frame relationship of film material there is no advantage in using 576p, better to let the display sort it out.

Cyril

Some players have very good de-interlacers like the Faroudja DCDi. In that case you really want the player to deinterlace and if possible upscale. So you are then indeed limited by the need to use a digital output unless you one of the few players that will upscale over component.

For many the holy grail is a player that outputs 480i or 576i over DVI or HDMI which they then feed into an external scaler/deinterlacer.

For my part I have started to not use a DVD player at all but use Zoomplayer with FFDShow and let the PC do the scaling, de-interlacing etc. and feed that to my TV over HDMI. I get a much better picture this way with much more control over settings

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richms

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Reply # 59710 3-Feb-2007 19:23

I virtually have to feed progressive into my Panasonic crt since the inbuilt de-interlacer is so bad and artifacts more then anything else I have ever seen

Richard rich.ms

sbiddle

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Reply # 59713 3-Feb-2007 21:10

I think all that jargon has probably confused 95% of all Geekzone users! :-)

What happened to the good old days when all you had was 3 plugs - 1 RCA composite video and L+R audio. Things were so much simpler!!

OrangeDrink

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Reply # 59814 5-Feb-2007 18:12

Component should be technically capable of 1080p but it's artificially limited to 1080i as far as I'm aware, forget the acronym responsible for that ;) the analog equivalent of HDCP!

However what you're seeing these days is upscaling DVDs that don't output upscaled images over Component but only do it through HDMI. Some of the newer ones don't even have Component output at all. For my money this is a scam Component doesn't allow content providers to control the output resolution (unless it's artificially limited in hard/software) where HDMI allows control via HDCP. The content providers and some manufacturers are pushing HDMI for their own selfish reasons and having tested both I don't see a difference in quality at all, if anything I prefer the Component outputs, it looks more natural to me.

stevenz

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Reply # 60840 15-Feb-2007 07:26

Turn the "Noise reduction" feature off in the TV if it's on. It does funny things to the picture on Bravias and is only useful for poor OTA transmissions. I've got a similar setup, DVP-NS92V player (older, bigger model) and 26" V-series bravia. Turn noise reduction on and the picture gets blurry. The player will only upscale over HDMI and I generally can't notice any difference anyway, the TV will automatically upscale to its native 1366x768 regardless and its internal scaler is pretty good so there's not a great deal of benefit.