Does MCE Vista running on a HD TV always up-convert the signal to 1080i or 720p HD?  In other words, if you are watching a DVD, is it up-converted?  Can I pass on purchasing an up-converting DVD player?  If the answer is: "it depends," then what are the settings to ensure HD playback?

Thank you

I don't offically know the answer, but I beleive the answer is yes, it has to. In my case, I'm driving my 47" LCD at 1080P through DVI->HDMI. It's clear that Vista MCE is not changing resolution when doing a DVD playback, so it must be upconverting. I'm just not sure what the up-conversion algorithm is. It's possible that the dedicated players do a better job of upconverting than Vista does, but I have to say that they look real good to me. I have no intention of buying an upconverting DVD player.

I'm curious about other opinions.

 

 

Dwatji-

what resolution is your vid card at? just curious.

1920x1080@60 Hz. This is recognized by my LCD TV as 1080P.

 

I believe the marrige has to be between the video card and the TV. If your video card is outputting 1080 X 1920 at 60 hertz and your TV is 1080p, then everything coming from your computer should be scaled to that. If your TV is only capable of 1080i or 720p your video card hopefully received EDID info from your TV and the video card has scaled it's output accordingly. (I think that's how it works) Either way, I doubt there is anything in your system downgrading output resolution to say... 480p so long as you have an HDTV.

I don't notice much difference between my old YpBpR DVD player and my new upscaling HDMI player on a 70" JVC 1080p lcos display. I only did it so everything in my system would connect via HDMI. Best way to stay married is to use one wire instead of four whenever possible.

Roger, thanks guys.

I'm 99.9% certain that copy protected DVDs are indeed knocked down to 480p due to restrictions placed upon us by the friendly folks who brought us that 'turd in the punchbowl' known as CableCARD DRM restrictions.

I've gotten around this by using AnyDVD, making every DVd I slap in there appear to be non-copy protected, but I'd place money on a standard install playing back DVDs at 480p.

 

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Ghostlobster
Moved to another HTPC solution, so I'm no longer a Media Center user, but I like to keep track of its progress.

I don't think so because a DVD is recorded at 480P. Plus, there isn't any DRM in standrd DVDs to my knowledge. 1080P information is not on the DVD, so either MCE, my NVIDIA 7600GS or my TV is turning it into 1080P to display since this is my panel resolution. I'm quite sure it's not the TV, or it would tell me that the signal resolution has changed. Therefore, it's being done before it hits the HDMI pipe in either software or hardware. I don't know which.

I have not yet upgraded to HD-DVD or blu-ray so I don't know how that is output. Your comment may very well apply here.

I've kinda asked this question before and the answer I got is that upscaling depends on your connection to the TV. Using DVI or HDMI media center will upscale DVD playback in all cases, but when using component connections a copy protected DVD will only playback in 480i (yes not even progressive). Ripped DVDs play back fine. This is the problem I have with my system. I'd go DVI but for some reason my TV and PC can't agree on the scaling of the image.

stand alone players can't upconvert with an analog connection also.  Its a macromedia thing, a law, they are not allowed to upscale on analog outputs..  however, the law says component specifically so vga connections to tv's do not have this restriction.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

I think you mean a Macrovision thing.

thats the one..   I always mix them up..

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

pippen:

I've kinda asked this question before and the answer I got is that upscaling depends on your connection to the TV. Using DVI or HDMI media center will upscale DVD playback in all cases, but when using component connections a copy protected DVD will only playback in 480i (yes not even progressive). Ripped DVDs play back fine. This is the problem I have with my system. I'd go DVI but for some reason my TV and PC can't agree on the scaling of the image.

I had this problem on my older toshiba hdtv, I ended up using a vga to componet box to get around it.  The computer thought it was outputting via vga so it did the upscalling.

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My Blog | My Movie Collection | myTV Collection

What you guys are seeing is not what I've experienced in the past.

With MCE2005 if I used a DVI connection to my HDTV, MCE would always drop down to 480i when playing back any copy protected DVD.  For everything else it would use the desktop resolution (1920x1080i) and do a great job of upscaling.  Note this was using an nVidia 6800 card.

With MCE2005 if I used analog component outputs or VGA, MCE would instead leave DVD playback in the desktop resolution (1080i) and do a great job of upscaling.

I then upgraded to an ATI X1950Pro video card, again used the component outputs and it continued to output upscaled DVD video.  This again was with MCE2005.  I had assumed that if I used DVI it would have gone back to the annoying behaviour of only playing copy protected DVDs at 480i so I didn't try it.  Are you guys certain that this should actually allow DVD playback at 1080i?  What video card do you have?

I then upgrade the operating system to Vista Home Premium and to my annoyance, now all copy protected DVDs are played back at 480i.  Everything else uses the resolution configured for Media Center (which actually isn't the same as the desktop - 720p desktop, 1080i Media Center; Vista does a nice job of automatically switching between the two).

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.

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?

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).

 

Please clarify for me?

With an HDCP compliant video card and a non-HDCP compliant TV, what connections allow video output of:

- copy protected DVDs upscaled to 1080i?  HDMI?, DVI?, VGA?, component?

- HD-DVDs at 720p and 1080i?  HDMI?, DVI?, VGA?, component?

- Blu-ray DVDs at 720p and 1080i?  HDMI?, DVI?, VGA?, component?

Our HDTV has DVI (analog and digital) as well as component inputs on it.  I also own a high quality VGA to component transcoder that will allow my HDTV to appear to be an analog VGA monitor (only TV video timings work though - 480i, 480p, 540p, 720p, 960i, 1080i, & 1440i so I have used Powerstrip in the past to create the proper video timing).

My preference is to have everything legit (no AnyDVD or similar software running), but if I'm forced to I'll go that route if its the only option (other than purchasing a new, HDCP compliant HDTV).

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

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.