Can anyone explain a DVD Upconverter to me?

Question

Does anyone know enough about these to explain them to me? The math just doesnt make sense to me (But, I am no math guru!).

The guys trying to sell these things at best buy and circuit city all say that they can take any 'regular' DVD and upconvert it to "Near-HD" quality. This just simply doesn't make sense to me. If a DVD only holds 4.7Gig of information and the AVI format on the DVD is uncompressed to begin with then how do you "upconvert" an uncompressed signal? Does this machine magically insert pixels of information where the DVD doesn't have any so that it can achieve the "Near-HD" quality that they are boasting? I just don't understand how you can turn a Hyundai into a Cadillac simply by "upconverting" it.

I need help with this one!

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

You have some good questions and I will do my best to answer them. But first let me say that up until a week ago I also did not know much about up-conversion vs. standard, or 1080p vs. 1080i. I have spent the last week, about 6 hours a day pouring over all the informaion I could get my hands on such as expert reviews, user reviews, and tech pages. So much research that I am starting to feel like an expert myself (but probably not). So I will give it my best shot. I will include links to specific information that I found helpful.

First, an upconverting DVD player is only worth getting if you have an HDTV and are not yet planing to get into HD-DVD's or Blu-Ray for the time being. And second, not all upconverting DVD players are equal ( we will come back to that later)

Lets go back to the your question: "Does this machine magically insert pixels of information where the DVD doesn't have any so that it can achieve the "Near-HD" quality that they are boasting?" First, if they are calling it "Near-HD" quality, they are streching the truth. Second, saying "magically insert pixels of information" is not all that far from the truth. Here is one link that I found to be a great help in understanding this:

http://www.av-outlet.com/en-us/dept_335.html

The upconversion DVD players actualy use a kind of chip that uses mathamatical algorithims among other things so that the machine will take the picture it is given and do its darndest to make it look the best it can on your HDTV (Again, if you don't have an HDTV and don't plan to get one, don't bother with upconversion.)

And like I said before, not all DVD players are created equal. The quality of the upconversion depends a lot on what upconversion technology is used. In basic upconversion players there is only slight improvment. In the DVD players with the best upconversion chip, I have seen many reviewers give it a "WOW." While they admit it is not HDTV they say the difference is noticable. Some people have had to adjust some settings to get the best picture.

From my research it seems the best upconversion chip is the Faroudja DCDi chip. The reviews of the DVD players that use this chip are the ones I have heard the most "WOW" from. This is the DVD player I will buy and a link to its review:

http://reviews.cnet.com/video-players-and-recorders/oppo-dv-981hd-dvd/4505-6463_7-32327927.html?tag=prod.txt.2

Source(s):

Listed in artical

Answer 2

this is the most widely and misunderstood verbiage used in the electronic market. up converting has nothing to do with making a DVD look like hd. this is another word used to describe what we call video-scaling. lets say you have a tv that has a native resolution of 1080p. well, the standard dvd only outputs 480p. which means that there would only be 800 X 600 of the pixels being actual used, but the tv has 1920 X 1080 you say. well the scaler takes the information and scales to the native resolution of the tv. if this were not done then you would have an image of the movie with a huge black box around it were the missing information would be. now the tv you by already has a scaler built into it. u do not need to buy a dvd player that up-converts or scales. the tv is already doing it. now a quality dvd player may do better than the TV but i doubt it. it is just techy marketing that is design to blow smoke at the consumer who is not familiar with these terms.i would look up the words scaleor video scaler to better understand this. hope this help.

Answer 3

well also there is no avi format on a DVD....it will be in ifo bup and vob files NO AVI......that is for vcd movies which we're not talking about....but also to remember that a real dvd is dual layer so actually it will hold just a little over 9GB instead of the formentioned 4.7GB on the consumer DVD's.