Proffesional video scaler

[DarkT]

Has anyone worked with a similiar device:

"High-performance video scaler, converting composite, S-video and YCbCr component video into high resolution computer and HDTV resolutions."

http://www.converters.tv/products/ntsc_to_hdtv/240.html

How well does it peform?

[Blue_MiSfit]

There are devices like this that can do a very good job.

Unfortunately, the good ones cost a _lot_ of money. Think upwards of $20k.

Doing such things reliably well on a wide range of sources, in real-time requires some pretty beefy custom hardware - hence the high price tag.

Do you need real-time upconversion? If not, use AviSynth :) It's free and can do just as well!

~MiSfit

[Lyris]

Yeah, on any consumer-level ($3000, etc) hardware scalers, I've never seen anything that looks substantially better (or even very much different) to a standard Lanczos filter.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Indeed. And deinterlacing complicates the question exponentially!

~MiSfti

[Lyris]

The interesting ones to me are the approaches that players like the Playstation 3 and the Toshiba XDE (which is far from perfect, but is nevertheless interesting) take: smoothing the high frequencies.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Eh..

That's essentially just noise reduction. I wonder how they do it. FFT3DFilter / FFT3DGPU are nicely tweakable in regards to frequency bands. Handy-dandy indeed!

IMO, good upscaling means a few things:

1) Deinterlacing
2) Scaling
3) Noise reduction / sharpening / other "enhancing"

Doing all 3, in real-time, in hardware is expensive :)

I know Toshiba's HD-DVD players had excellent upscaling, but I don't know if they actually did edge-directed interpolation, which is sort of the holy grail IMO :) Just look at NNEDI!

~MiSfit