# Reviving the HTPC



## toecheese (May 3, 2006)

I posted the gist of this (and more) on my blog, but what is boils down to is that I'm tired of not getting upconverted standard DVD to my projector- and I'm not going to buy a new projector, nor gray-market DVD player to do it.



> The other reason has to do with upconversion. A little background: DVDs are a format stored at 480p. That means there are 480 lines of information available to be displayed. Most projectors are far higher than that, my own has 768 lines of resolution. These same projectors usually attempt to fill the full image by doing some amount of interpolation of images so you get the full size screen. This works well enough. However, when (my) projector gets this image, it is in analog format and with so much information it can only scan this signal so fast before it just gives up and punts, which means a soft image. But, DVDs are stored as a digital format- a series of scene descriptions which are converted into the analog signal. At the DVD player itself, if this interpolation was done before analog, knowing the output to 720p or other format, it would result in a much clearer picture (because it avoids 'generation loss').
> 
> Indeed, there are 'upconverting' DVD players which do just this. My Philips player does this. Except not over component- only HDMI. There must be some technical reason for this. Wait a minute, component can handle 1080p. Turns out there is no technical reason for this at all. It is a Hollywood restriction. For some inane reason, it was done to prevent piracy. Which means that the DVD that I own cannot be viewed on the equipment that I own using the better image processing of equipment that I own. Smells like a lawsuit, or a DMCA exception. Indeed, there are players outside of Hollywood's Iron Curtain which play upconverted content: Oppo, NeuNeo, etc. I don't see any reason to go buy yet another DVD player when the one I have does this same thing, but has component HD output disabled. It makes no sense at all- Hollywood doesn't benefit from me buying a new projector that accepts HDMI, and I cannot imagine a casual users (or even a hardcore one) bothering to upscale their DVD, output to analog, then somehow capture this (analog) and re-encode it to save it as high-def. They're probably targeting some fly-by-night shop in Singapore who might have this equipment, but inconveniencing millions of valid users of this technology. The MPAA sucks.
> 
> ...


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## basementjack (Sep 18, 2006)

any news on this?


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## Mike P. (Apr 6, 2007)

The Helios H2000 does 480p/576p/720p/1080i via HDMI, Component and VGA, for under $100. Seems to me this would be a lot cheaper then investing in a HTPC.

http://www.helios-labs.com/us/products/H2000/h2000_tech_Specs.shtml


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## toecheese (May 3, 2006)

Hey Jack-

I tried a buddy's HD-DVD drive and got stuttering and painful video scaling issues. Next step is to try it with a good video card instead of the built-in one.


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## basementjack (Sep 18, 2006)

I've been working on my htpc for a while now - 
I haven't done any signficant looking into scaling sd dvd's yet - my toshiba A3 does a really good job of that!
I am interested in taking collections of SD material and getting them on the server in an efficient way - maybe DIVX maybe something else. 
The quality doesn't seem to match SD-DVD (and is nowhere near SD upscaled in the toshiba) but it would be perfect for all my kids movies, as well as all our TV series we own on DVD.


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