Upscaling DTH signals to 1080p using AVR

[chits007]

Has anyone tried this setup ?
Please share your experiences .

One concern is regarding aspect ratio ; if we upscale 576i (4:3) PAL signals to 1080p(16:9) ...how would it work?

AVR with video upscale feature are costly (faroudja DCDi technology); why do one need Video upscale AVR if tata sky goes HD?

Shae thoghts guys..

 

[svenkateshsmart]

Hi,

I am using Denon 1910 to upscale BigTV DTH, but I would not say there is only marginal difference that I notice and most of the times, the screen tends to flicker, due to handshaking issues.

IMHO, one cannot get much benefit by upscaling DTH through an AVR. In my experience, only certain DVD movies look good when upscaled!

Cheers!

 

[chits007]

Yes Tata SKY looks good enough even without upscaling on even non-full HD LCD TV ( I have 1366 *768 HD-Ready SAmsung LCD TV) and I can say it look decent enought; i havent see how it looks when scaled up to HD level)

Then why spent money on AVR which has video upscale technology ;anyways they are costly then sound-only AVR;
the only problem is you need separate wires ; single output wont works and everytime you change source you also have to change TV Input

venkatesh why you buy Denon with video upscale technology/ may be i missed some point here ;

 

[svenkateshsmart]

Hi,

For me, DTH is of much use, as I am not a TV buff. I am inclined more towards movies and music and after getting exposed to the BD world and PJ, it has been changed to only movies 720p and 1080p movies. It has been weeks since I watched TV.

The upscaling feature will be of lot of use for me when I connect other sources like old DVD players which will need upscaling and the AVR does a pretty good job in that area.

Cheers!

 

[kapvin]

Yes Tata SKY looks good enough even without upscaling on even non-full HD LCD TV ( I have 1366 *768 HD-Ready SAmsung LCD TV) and I can say it look decent enought; i havent see how it looks when scaled up to HD level)

Then why spent money on AVR which has video upscale technology ;anyways they are costly then sound-only AVR;
the only problem is you need separate wires ; single output wont works and everytime you change source you also have to change TV Input

venkatesh why you buy Denon with video upscale technology/ may be i missed some point here ;

Hey chits007,

from any SD source to any digital output device - DLP or LCD, which is not of the same native resolution, scaling will have to happen. otherwise your tatasky will appear in a small 720x576 window on you 1366 x768 screen.

when you say no scaling, what is actually happening is that scaling is being done by your TV. of course your TV may be good and doing very high quality spatio-temporal scaling (often called 3d scaling --> 2d is length x height.. the 3rd dimension is the time domain) so you are getting good results.

spatial resizing-
the simplest resize is "nearest neighbour" where the resizing algo self explanatory, the bi-linear, bi cubic, spline offer increasing sharper results. The more sohisticated algos do upsampling to anti-alias... i.e sample a source to 2x the target resolution in direction say 2732 x 1536 then do AA and resize back to target resolution.

temporal analysis would look at the pixel in the previous(2) frame and the next (2)frame to give a better result.. often helps reduce random noise



Net output of this long discourse - on a flat panel, scaling (of vary sophistication) is always happening.. if your TV has a rockstar scaler built in (esp if you have a high end tv).. you probably won't see or need the full benefit of a fancy HT video processor.. but for the rest of us...


okay, you may ask, how i'm speaking so emperically on this subject.. that's yet another story. in brief.. i got so p****ed off when i found the lord of the rings trilogy extended edition not being released on BD, I decided to work on the upscaling of my personal DVD copies of the trilogy using my PC. hence the research and the work. It's the subject of another thread but I've got some really really good results - will post with screenies when I have a little time.

cheers

 

[chits007]

Thanks Kapvin for such detailed reply...

One query..when I set LCD TV (Samsung) to 4:3 I see black bars on left & right only why not on up & down ?; My TV is 1366 * 768 ; PAL 4:3 is 720 *576..

Presently I am used to watching 4:3 in 16:9 mode.

I am planning to buy HTIB so worrying if I should buy one which has video scaler or simply audio amplifier one...

 

[kapvin]

Thanks Kapvin for such detailed reply...

One query..when I set LCD TV (Samsung) to 4:3 I see black bars on left & right only why not on up & down ?; My TV is 1366 * 768 ; PAL 4:3 is 720 *576..

Presently I am used to watching 4:3 in 16:9 mode.

I am planning to buy HTIB so worrying if I should buy one which has video scaler or simply audio amplifier one...

the black bar on the side -that's called pillar boxing..

tv pixels are rectangular.. while computer and all modern digital displays have square pixels. in fact tv pixels size vary according to tv system - for example 720x480 is NTSC 4:3. there are flags (PAR-picture aspect ratio, DAR- display aspect) in the video stream which help you decode this correctly.

your stb video D/A signals 4:3 PAR - which the TV then scales up to the native resolution (in this case 1024 x768). the 171x768 black bar on each side is the pillar

if you have an anamorphic (widescreen picture) which is signalled correctly, your tv will automatically "stretch the picture by a further 4/3 to total of 16:9 and fill you entire 1366 x 768 screen.

here is an illustrative example from LOTR extende edition first disk. - I own it so I hope I'm not breaking any forum rules

direct video grab - frame 95995


anamorphically resized - to current 16:9 ratio


Bilinear resize 1280 x 720 - what you'd get in a very basic FP TV



And with 3d noise noise processing & edge enhancement& color correction


if you cannot discern any significant difference between 3 & 4, you'll be happy with your TV's Scaler.

hope this helps

 

[theironhorse]

*********http://www.digitalpixels.co.in/LKV361.html***** chk this******

dth upscaler.. however i personally feel that ne upscaling will not bring any good... also from a distance of 8-10 ..u wont even find diffrence that u can compare of..

chk the link ..i spoke to these guys...that is prices at 4k ....l

 

[chits007]

if you have an anamorphic (widescreen picture) which is signalled correctly, your tv will automatically "stretch the picture by a further 4/3 to total of 16:9 and fill you entire 1366 x 768 screen.

I don't undertsood fully; I have HDMI DVD player so if I sent Wide screen signal 720p(1280*720) ; It should be displayed as is ..right ? or it will upscaled to fill

since my TV is HD READY ; Full HD signal 1080p signals will be downscaled to nearest 1366 * 768 ?


Thanks for your description i understood so basiclaly TV scales to nearest factor which can fill in and that comes to 1024*768.

 

[Deshu]

Hey chits007,

from any SD source to any digital output device - DLP or LCD, which is not of the same native resolution, scaling will have to happen. otherwise your tatasky will appear in a small 720x576 window on you 1366 x768 screen.

when you say no scaling, what is actually happening is that scaling is being done by your TV. of course your TV may be good and doing very high quality spatio-temporal scaling (often called 3d scaling --> 2d is length x height.. the 3rd dimension is the time domain) so you are getting good results.

spatial resizing-
the simplest resize is "nearest neighbour" where the resizing algo self explanatory, the bi-linear, bi cubic, spline offer increasing sharper results. The more sohisticated algos do upsampling to anti-alias... i.e sample a source to 2x the target resolution in direction say 2732 x 1536 then do AA and resize back to target resolution.

temporal analysis would look at the pixel in the previous(2) frame and the next (2)frame to give a better result.. often helps reduce random noise



Net output of this long discourse - on a flat panel, scaling (of vary sophistication) is always happening.. if your TV has a rockstar scaler built in (esp if you have a high end tv).. you probably won't see or need the full benefit of a fancy HT video processor.. but for the rest of us...


okay, you may ask, how i'm speaking so emperically on this subject.. that's yet another story. in brief.. i got so p****ed off when i found the lord of the rings trilogy extended edition not being released on BD, I decided to work on the upscaling of my personal DVD copies of the trilogy using my PC. hence the research and the work. It's the subject of another thread but I've got some really really good results - will post with screenies when I have a little time.

cheers

Hi Kepvin,

By looking at your post i belive you have lot of GYAN in this thing. Could you pl help me in deciding some thing, i am planning to buy denon 1910 primarily becauce of its upscaling feature. Now, i have a samsung LED Tv with Dish Tv connection , do you think if i conect my TV through this AVR ,the PQ will be pushed to further good levels? and this upscaling is a sales man blah blah in all the show rooms where in we can only test the sound quality and no where this upscaling is demonstrated [though they pitch this feature very much].

Pl help me with this , if this upscaling is not of importance then i will be better off saving some money.......Thanks in advance.

 

[kapvin]

Hi Kepvin,

By looking at your post i belive you have lot of GYAN in this thing. Could you pl help me in deciding some thing, i am planning to buy denon 1910 primarily becauce of its upscaling feature. Now, i have a samsung LED Tv with Dish Tv connection , do you think if i conect my TV through this AVR ,the PQ will be pushed to further good levels? and this upscaling is a sales man blah blah in all the show rooms where in we can only test the sound quality and no where this upscaling is demonstrated [though they pitch this feature very much].

Pl help me with this , if this upscaling is not of importance then i will be better off saving some money.......Thanks in advance.

Hi Deshu,

that's an answer that you'll eventually need to get for yourself.

PQ, like SQ, but even more so, is pretty subjective.. some people love overblown contrast and saturation, and dont care about black or white crush, some like smooth, soft picture, others like sharp pictures, and are willing to live with edge artifacts. so what works for one, may not work for the other.

haveing said that, there are some empirical guidelines.

1. All flat panel displays have some sort of scaler / video processor, since they display in only one (native) resolution, they need to process signals of all other resolutions and convert to the native resolution. quality of scalers vary and you'll have to judge what works for you, but general rule of thumb is that higher end tvs have better scalers / picture processors. I guess your LED TV is not a low end tv.

2. DTH PQ, (esp tata sky, which I have, cannot empircally comment on the others) is compromised because of low bit rates. Mpeg compression is lossy, as bitrates reduce, more and more picture information is thrown away, so even an high end processor cannot reconstruct a hi rez picture when so much info is gone. this is especially true of fast motion scenes, such as sports, action movies etc. if you watched the IPL final - then during the award ceremony, there was a scane when they were raining down ticker tape ont he winning team... that was multiple fast motion elements, and on my tata sky plus it appeared as a huge white noise haze...

The bigger point I am making is that dth PQ is flawed at source. You may be disappointed as progressively higher quality processing does not yield equivalently improved results. OTOH, if you want to scale dvds (much, much higher bitr rates than DTH) you will definitely see an improvement with better processing.

to sum.. don't expect magic from the denon processor, there is only so much improvement you can do to current DTH transmission unless they improve either bitrate or coding efficiency (mpeg2->mpeg4-> mpeg4 AVC) -> at best you'll just mask those artifacts that annoy you most ( which you can do using the picture controls on your TV)

anyway don't buy the AVR for PQ alone, reviews on this forum indicate best in class SQ for the 1910.

pm me for any further clarifications.


regards

 

[beta_sweater]

Ok here's the real deal guys. Most DTH signals including digital are rarely higher than 576p because our service providers do not transmit HD signals yet. Anyway, the point is, even if the TV uses its in-built upscaler or the receiver uses its own upscaler, the picture quality is rarely going to improve drastically. Sure there will be fewer artifacts and motion blurring but on the whole the difference is barely perceptible. It's like taking a 1 megapixel photo and increasing the number of pixels, in say photoshop, to get a 3 megapixel picture. The end result is still going to look like a blurry picture. Even with a resized image that takes the nearest neighbor and copies those attributes to create new pixels the difference isn't that great (bicubic/bilinear and others). Basically, if you want the best picture quality, don't try to upscale, just get full HD. As far as the Denon 1910 is concerned, as pointed before, it does have the best in class performance. So that would make it an excellent choice. Just don't rely on feeding it a sucky image and expect it to do wonders to it.

 

[sanjay0864]

Sure there will be fewer artifacts and motion blurring but on the whole the difference is barely perceptible.

Actually that is totally incorrect. There is no scaler in the world that can reduce digital artifacts or any of the other video problems that are present in the atrocious DTH signals generally available in India. As a matter of fact, the flaws in the picture will only get highlighted. The old adage "garbage in, garbage out" still holds true for upscaling also. Since, in the case of watching a SD signal on a HD LCD or Plasma is going to involve scaling anyhow, you should simply choose to do the scaling, through whichever of your equipment in the chain, has a better scaler. Trial and error is the only way out. But in general, a reciever such as the Denon AVR1909 will most probably do a better job of upscaling compared to your TV. That is unless you have a very high end tv and even then, generally most HD TVs are not engineered for optimum SD performance.

 

[beta_sweater]

Hi Sanjay,
Sorry about that, but it is true as you pointed out that the reduction of artifacts will not happen through HD upscaling. My point was exactly as you mentioned, garbage in, garbage out! An HD upscaler will not improve picture quality as I have mentioned. Nothing can. So by feeding SD to an HD upscaler be it in the TV or receiver you are not at all going to get a better picture. It will just blur the image to make the overall sharpness less and will add a softening filter so that there are no jagged edges or pixels. Again the final picture choice will have to be made on the quality of upscaler. And as I said before, the Denon will probably have a better upscaler than the TV itself.

 

[pungan]

I have Denon 2310 and tata sky. Upscaling done by 2310 is satisfactory but not for all channels. If you sit less than 3- 4 ft from the television you can see some artifacts and pixelization.