[MPlayer-users] Upconverting?

[Corey Hickey]

Grant wrote:
>> >>> MPlayer still lacks "fairies" support to invent the pixels in
>> >>> between, needed to get a truly HD picture.
>> >>
>> >> Just get latest SVN and recompile with:
>> >>
>> >> --enable-fairies
>> >>
>> >> Then try adding -vf fscale=1600:1200 (or any other resolution you
>> >> might desire) to your command line.
>> >
>> > Gentoo's latest mplayer ebuild is apparently an SVN snapshot from
>> > 08/10/2006 and doesn't seem to include a fairies USE flag for
>> > compilation.  Was fairies support added after that date, or is the
>> > ebuild missing a USE flag?
>>
>> Uhh...
>>
>> In case you're actually being serious: that was sarcasm.
>>
>> The whole point of the "fairies" bit was to emphasize that "to do what
>> you're asking for would require magic". (Or at least a reasonable
>> facsimile.)
>>
>> (Since I've been on another run of mistaken posts lately in various
>> fora, I've just checked to be sure I haven't accidentally slipped into a
>> parallel universe where such an option *does* exist; latest SVN
>> configure does not contain the string "fairies".)
> 
> I've been gotten.
> 
> But obviously I'm not talking about adding information to the picture
> that wasn't there to begin with.  It seems reasonable to me that if a
> high-resolution TV is told what to display for each of its pixels, the
> picture might be better than if it tries to extrapolate on its own.
> That was the idea anyway.
> 
> All I'm trying to do is squeeze every benefit out of using a computer
> to play back DVDs instead of a consumer device.  I guess that's funny?

Don't worry about it; I don't think anybody really meant to poke fun at 
you. The point was a bit vaguely expressed, but, as I understand it, you 
shouldn't really expect much better quality from using mplayer to scale.

I have nearly no experience with consumer DVD equipment, but I think 
that if your HD display device claims to scale DVD-resolution input and, 
when doing so, looks noticably worse than using mplayer for scaling, 
then your display device is lousy.

Nevertheless, there's no reason you shouldn't experiment. Use '-vf 
scale=xxx:yyy' to use mplayer's software scaler (xxx and yyy are the 
target horizontal and vertical resolutions, repectively).

Things to read:
mplayer man page (search for -sws)
DOCS/tech/swscaler_methods.txt (in the mplayer source)

There have also been some tests of different parameters posted on the 
web. Search google if you want.

-Corey