[ale] Using Linux as an Upconverting DVD player?

[Sean Kilpatrick]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 20:40, aaron wrote:
| The end result of any scaling 
| process for bitmapped material** can never exceed the original resolution, 
| and it won't matter if you use 4 or 16 or 256 little blocks to fill the
| space of the original big block, you still just get one big block for a 
| proportional area of the image (with a whole lot more overhead to display 
| it).


As many of you know, Aaron and I amiably disagree on many political
matters. But (with more than 20 years of solid work behind me as a
commercial photographer) we agree on this point: you can't create data
points from nothing. The lossy compression used in DVDs leaves too
many "holes" where there is no data for an algorithm to work with.

The best tool I know for this kind of work is Genuine Fractals (tm) --
a plug-in for Photoshop.  If you have a 6 megapixel image and you need
to display it as a 4' X 6' print, GF will manufacture the missing data
points. The math involved is hairy; fast processors and gigabytes of memory
are useful. That's for a single image. At 24 or 30 frames a second, it
would take months to rebuild a 90 minute movie with a single PC. You'd
want a cluster for this. And that's assuming you are upconverting from the
original (uncompressed) image.
A clue that this isn't easy is that two formats are competing for the
market in a DVD-like media for HD television.  If the up-conversion were
simple, the heavy hitters would already have thousands of these discs
on the shelves.

Sean

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