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View Full Version : FYI: Upscale your DVDs to HD via GPU acceleration


LandShark
04-02-09, 04:30 PM
Upscaling algorithm

ArcSoft's upscaling algorithms take data that's present across multiple frames in the encoded (and compressed) video, and extrapolates it to reconstruct more of the original image data in each frame. In this way, the algorithm is able to reconstruct data that may have been lost or ignored on one frame, but may have been present on another, and then apply it to the surrounding frames.

This makes colors more vibrant, pixelated data less pixelated, contrasts greater, and it is able to remove a lot of the JPEG-like square-box artifacts which inhabit most compressed video forms. The end result is an upscaled video that is not a literal pixel-by-pixel rendering, but rather one which includes more image data per pixel per frame than the original video itself would've exposed using only its decoder and a scale-to-new-image-size algorithm.

Because of the massive compute requirements of this type of algorithm, searching forward and backward from every given frame for additional color data, ignoring noise and filtering through to real exposed data, on a traditional CPU the algorithm takes considerably longer and uses nearly all of the CPU power. By moving the workload away from the CPU and onto the GPU courtesy of Nvidia's CUDA software library, large compute jobes can be carried out with a minimal impact on the overall system performance, allowing for a single machine and user to be more productive on a more responsive machine.

Read more...... (http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41918/140/)

now, I'm wondering do I have to use TMT3 in order to take advantage of this (most likely I bet!), or I could use any Directshow player (e.g. MediaPortal's internal player, MPC, etc.) as long as the codec/setup is right....... :rolleyes:

Old Thrashbarg
04-02-09, 06:13 PM
I saw that over on Bit-Tech, and apparently you do have to use Total Media Theatre with it. So, it's basically $100+ investment to do something that ffdshow's filters can do for free on any reasonably modern machine. (FFDshow would probably use more CPU than the ArcSoft thing, but it's not like you're going to be pegging a modern CPU with it in the first place.)

nd4spdbh2
04-07-09, 09:06 PM
dang if only it was free and a codec like nvidia's purevideo.... i currently use mediaportal with ffdshow (blur & nr, sharpness and upscale filters) using purevideo to get the video information as well as audio info for dvds. doing 720x480 to 1920x1080 with those filters turned up quite a ways takes a decent ammount of my 3.2ghz e7200... 60-70% cpu usage. ... 1080p bluray mkv's use half that cpu usage ... and i dont even have a .246x hw accel gfx card.