Upconversion As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,102 words · ~5 min read
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It would be a wonderful world if we could just watch everything in glorious
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4K or even at the very least full 1080p
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HD. But we've all been faced with that
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unfortunate choice when watching something that was recorded and encoded
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at a lower resolution. Do you watch it in a tiny little window to keep the
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picture sharp and just kind of move your face closer to the screen? Or do you
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blow it up to full screen only to have everything look like it was recorded on
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a potato? For years now, many companies
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have been looking for a better solution to this, or at least a partial solution
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to this, and it's called upconverting or
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upscaling. And while you mostly see it used as a marketing tool on newer DVD
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players or TVs, you've probably used up
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conversion at some point in your life, even if you've completely sworn off
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optical discs. For example, if you're watching a 480p YouTube video and you
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make it full screen on your HD or full
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HD monitor, then the video has effectively been upscaled to fit the
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screen. You see, that 480p video contains about
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300,000 individual pixels, which might sound like a lot, but full HD resolution
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contains over 2 million pixels with 4K
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being four times that amount. So, there
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just aren't enough pixels then in low res video to actually fit the whole
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screen without doing some kind of a conversion. Now, modern displays
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themselves have logic that can apply an algorithm to a lower resolution video
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clip or even something like your BIOS as you're booting up your computer for the
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first time. And it what it can do is guess what the missing pixels should be
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when it expands the video to full screen.
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Unfortunately, a lot of the time it just plain doesn't look very good. For
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example, if the display recognizes that there's a lot of, you know, grass in
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Sound of Music, it'll fill in that grassy area with basically big chunks of
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gigantic green pixels that looks pretty nasty. Now, upscaling logic can try to
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smooth out the edges of those lines so they don't look so blocky, but this
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amounts to basically an anti-aliasing
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effect as opposed to something that really makes it look as though it were
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actually shot, you know, in 4K, for
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example. So, wait a second then, Lionus. If it's better than nothing, how do I
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get this up conversion then? Can all screens do it? And if all screens can do
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it, well, what's the point of those upconverting DVD players that I see at
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the store? Are they just snake oil? Not exactly. So DVD, it's it's right in the
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name, is a digital format, but most early DVD players only had analog
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outputs like component video. This means that the signal is getting converted
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from digital to analog and then back to digital again when it goes onto your
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flat screen TV. This conversion and recon conversion ultimately leads to a
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loss in quality. So modern upconverting
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players have digital output such as HDMI to avoid doing so many conversions and
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they also have their own more sophisticated upconverting logic that is
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arguably better than especially what an older TV would be able to do on its own.
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Remember though that upscaling isn't a
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real substitute for watching native highdefinition or 4K content and an
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upscaled video is always not going to
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look as good as something that was shot natively and encoded in higher
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definition. So specifically, no matter how good your algorithm is, and they're
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always trying to sell the upconverting capabilities of this new TV when it runs
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at a resolution for which there's no freaking content available. No matter
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how good it is, you can expect some blurriness or other visual artifacts
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from the processor guessing where the pixels should be. But you should notice
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a slight improvement, making it at least a way to breathe a little more life into
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your standard definition videos as long as you manage your expectation and don't
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think that it's going to be as though the Wizard of Oz was shot on a freaking
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yeah. And you can get a free trial, too. So, thanks for watching this episode of
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Fast as Possible. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, then hit that button. If you didn't, then I guess you
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could hit the other button. Also, don't forget that we've got two other
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fantastic channels, including Channel Super Fun, where we've got this video
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that is definitely awesome and you're definitely going to want to check out because come on, let's face it, you're
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done watching this video. So, you know, you need something to do, right?