brumwald:

HT Slider:

I can't understand the logic behind all of this anyway.  Why on earth would anyone be concerned about "upscaling" video?  Its not like any extra information is being stolen from the movie makers.  On top of that wouldn't a digital output (like) be much more likely to be captured and recorded?  As far as I'm aware there isn't such a thing as a component video recorder that can handle high definition video anywhere.

It comes down to what device that does the upscaling best. If you have an 1080p TV and you send it an 480p signal the TV then have to upscale it to 1080p. Cheap/old TVs are often quite bad at this and you can gain quite a bit of quality if you do it on the computerside - leaving the TV just to change pixels.

There are quite a bit different ways to upscale a movie. What MCE is doing and the very most DVDplayers (thats even capable of doing it) is very basic. However you can with applications such as ffdshow upscale and add quite a bit of detail to the movie. This is very CPU intense and you need a fast CPU to do it on even such low-resolution movies as DVDs. But the result is quite impressive. Never got it to work myself as I wanted (although haven't tried that much).

Too bad I didn´'t find some examples of this because I knew I was skepitcal about it in the beginning.

HT Slider:

Anyway, the reason I'm searching for threads like this one is right now I'm trying to figure out how to enable playback of DVDs in Vista upscaled to 1080i.  If I dig out the DVI cable, pull out my HDTV and HTPC and hook it up am I going to be able to use 1080i for everything?

You don't know why you should upscale but want to do it anyway? :)
Did you notice better quality when the PC upscaled it? If not it might be pointless.

But to be honest I have no idea. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will lock into 480p if no HDCP is available. But I've never heard of anything similar for DVDs. Maybe I've missed something big but I have always looked at DVDs in my windows-resolution before. Granted I've never looked on DVDs on my MCE machine (I don't even see the option in the 10" interface :o).

If I were to guess I'd guess that it was a setting in the decoder.

HT Slider:

What about playback of HD-DVDs?  My understanding there is without an HDCP TV that all 720p and 1080i/p content will be downconverted to 480i if a DVI or VGA connection is used.  I am also under the impression that if component is used to for the TV that full 1080i will be functional again (opposite of what you guys are suggesting above for copy protected DVDs).

HDCP requires a digital connection and the only two that I know of that has HDCP support today is DVI-D and HDMI (basically DVD-D and HDMI are the exact same thing when it comes to video). However it's more common for HDMI devices to support HDCP whereas DVI are only gettingt it more recently on some graphiccards (DVD players and such generally has abandonded on DVI for HDMI).

The positive    side is that HDCP isn't active as far as I know so that might "just" be a future problem. However I don't know if Vista enforces those demands as well. Could be.
Perhaps component will be able to output 1080i, I know there were some discussions about that at least, but any other analogue connection should only output 480p - if HDCP is enabled.

HDCP is broken a long time ago so lets just hope that the movie-industry realizes that HDCP won't stop piracy one bit but will hinder customers that actually buy content.

I've been looking into this a lot more and there seems to be some misinformation in both your post and mine as well as all over the internet in the forums.

upconverting 480i to 1080i/p is what I meant when I said "upscale".

I too have experimented a lot with upconverting video using different video cards, different decoders and 3rd party software decoders such as ffdshow.  In my experience, both nVidia's "Pure Video" (6xxx series and up) and ATI's "AVIVO" video processing hardware (ATI X1xxx series) do a very good job of upconverting from 480i to 1080i.  ffdshow, in my experience, didn't produce a better image, required a lot of CPU cycles to be used (making the system less responsive), and overall wasn't worth all of the effort to get it working (I also never did get it working within Media Center but I didn't put all that much effort into it).  ffdshow does have advantages for other video formats, but not so much for mpeg-2 content (both DVR-MS and DVDs use mpeg-2).  Prior to AVIVO and Pure Video, ffdshow was the way to go, but now the hardware upconversion is definitely good enough and the best way to go IMO for mpeg-2 content.

My Toshiba HDTV only natively supports 1080i.  Due to the fact that 540p is effectively the same as far as the TV is concerned it can also do 540p natively.  Although not officially supported, it also does 720p, 960i, and 1440i but the clarity of these is not quite as good as 1080i.  Because of this, if you send it a 480i signal it internally upconverts it to 1080i.  Unfortunately the TV does a very poor job of it compared to everything else I've tried (cheap upconverting DVD players, ATI and nVidia video cards, our ExpressVu HD set top box, and of course our HTPC).  In reality, Toshiba states that 480i is not officially supported through the component input nor DVI and s-video should be used instead

Anyway, what this means to me is I absolutely must perform 480i to 1080i upconversion prior to sending the video to the HDTV to get reasonable image quality.  When 1080i is used the image quality is excellent in every way.  When I send it 480i it is actually worse than watching a DVD on our 36" SD TV downstairs because the built in upconversion is that bad through component inputs.

As far as specs and connections between devices and an HDTV, as long as analog (component or VGA) is used, the rules and certifying bodies all allow both upconversion of 480i to 1080i (or 720p/1080p) and the sending of 1080i/p (or 720p) from HD-DVD or Blu-ray players directly to the HDTV. 

If, on the other hand, a digital connection is made (DVI-D or HDMI), the video is copy protected and there isn't fully compliant HDCP through the entire chain (including video card and HDTV), HD-DVD & Blu-ray video can only be output at 480 (effectively downconverted).

In other words, if you're HDTV, is not HDCP compliant (like mine), but your video card is (like mine) and you connect using an HD analog method (component), you should be able to both upconvert DVDs to 1080i (or any other format) as well as output HD-DVDs and Blu-ray DVDs using their full HD format (720p, 1080i or 1080p).

Right now HD-DVD and Blu-ray output through PowerDVD Ultra works as it should through both analog and digital connections (HD is downconverted only when an unsecure or non HDCP path is used with a digital connection).

Unfortunately right now, Vista (or the video drivers) screw up and turns off upconversion when attempting to upconvert DVDs and output them through component analog connections.  Vista apparently allows upconverted DVD content to be output through unsecure DVI though (if anything, this is the one that would have more of a reason to force 480 output).

In other words with Vista, in order to be able to both upconvert regular DVDs and play high definition DVDs without a fully HDCP compliant HDTV, you need to constantly keep swapping back and forth between component (for HD-DVD and Blu-ray) and DVI (for upconverted DVD output).

Reading the forums there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinterpretation of the DVD specifications and this may be why Vista doesn't correctly allow upconversion through component output.  Hopefully this error will be corrected in the future through a "Windows Update" update or patch.

Oh, it seems that I'm not quite up to date regarding this :o

Hope that that nasty Vista stuff resolves itself (soon). There are few things that turns my stomach so bad as DRM solutions that hinders honest customers. Completely unacceptable IMO.

correct me if i am wrong, but didnt microsoft always say vista would only output protected content in high def if it was done using hdmi with hdpc. I know they definatly said this would be for HD movies but could it not include upscaled protected dvds too?

edit: wow nvm i should learn to read up sometime

omnicronx:

correct me if i am wrong, but didnt microsoft always say vista would only output protected content in high def if it was done using hdmi with hdpc. I know they definatly said this would be for HD movies but could it not include upscaled protected dvds too?

edit: wow nvm i should learn to read up sometime

I haven't specifically read that anywhere from Microsoft, but I've read it posted in forums on the internet.

I hope that isn't Microsoft's decision.  If it is, it will really take away from the ability to use Media Center as an HD-DVD or Blu-ray player and guys like me with non-HDCP compliant HDTVs will be forced to either drop Media Center and purchase hardware HD DVD players or install DRM breaking software such as AnyDVD HD.

I can't see why they would intentionally do this though.  The only parties that might benifit from this would be HDTV manufacturers because some customers might (possibly) choose to purchase a new HDCP compliant HDTV instead of purchasing a compliant HD DVD player to replace Media Center.  I can only see this hurting Microsoft and the whole Media Center acceptance into the living room that Microsoft wants.

The other huge downside to a decision like this is it will strongly encourage enthusiasts to purchase decryption breaking software such as AnyDVD HD.  The more people running software like this and/or looking for ways around DRM, the more people likely to make illegal copies of both DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-ray DVDs "because they can" once this software is installed.

Edit: Another thing I thought I'd add.  I have contacted Cyberlink about this and they confirmed that Power DVD Ultra does allow HD output through component video (per the spec).  I've also spoken to several people running this and they've confirmed it does work.  I also tested component out to a non HDCP HDTV with a Toshiba HD-DVD player and it also worked (1080i output).  So if Microsoft for some reason chooses to unreasonbly lock component output to 480i when (if) they offer an HD-DVD or Blu-ray player (WMP or Media Center), there are confirmed other options that do work.