Prevent upscaling/'boxed' 576i vhs on tv

[dancedar]

My father has some vhs tapes which he wants to be able to watch on a new 1080p hdtv when we get it - knowing it won't be 1080p source.
I've captured the vhs tapes via a Pinnacle device to .mp4 files which are 720ix576 res (I know, more than the source but whatever).
Playing them on tv they look terrible (naturally) but is it possible to prevent tvs from upscaling a video file to the full screen resolution, ie just place it 1:1 in a (small) box in the middle of the screen with both letter and pillar boxing? or is this not possible on tvs?

The only way I've tried to prevent this is extracting the avi stream and adding black bars to the top and bottom (252px each) creating a 720x1080 file (yes, original 720p wide, 1080p high) which fits the height and would presumable keep the footage part the correct (small) size. Obviously this takes hours to do but is there a quicker way ie force tv to not upscale and play in a small box in the middle?

This is how my video thumbnails to give an idea of what I've tried!

[Baldrick]

How do you play it? If using a htpc can you zoom out. Or else must you add black borders and reconvert like you are doing.

[dancedar]

It'll be playing via either an avi/mp4 on an sd card into the tv or on a dvd as a computer file.
Is there not a way to prevent this upscaling on tvs in general? Kinda new to this and really don't want to bother adding bars to recordings if it's just possible to resize the viewport on screen.

[dancedar]

Actually, I can play the vhs through scart to the tv, too, but assume that's even harder to control the screen 'size/resolution'?

[jagabo]

Unless your TV has a zoom out feature you can't control the upscaling -- except by reencoding with a black border as you are doing. Use faster settings in your encoder. With a dual core celeron I can get x264 encoding SD video in about 1/3 the running time of the video using the veryfast preset.

[dancedar]

Thanks for the replies.

I don't have the tv yet, we're just looking for one but couldn't find any info about the zooming in/out possibility.

I've a dual core 2.3 4gb ram laptop using avidemux for the video encoding (am interlacing as assume this can't be done by a tv) - having to extract the avi with Pazera_Free_MP4_to_AVI_Converter which is really fast (naturally). Only have 25 3hr vhs tapes do do, but if this is the only way they will look acceptable (not upscaled into oblivion) then it's worth doing for him.

I tried TMPGEnc but either the output's brightness was virtually making the video all white (any ideas) or selecting centre placing of 720x576 on a 'screen' video size of 1080x1920 the video was really compressed, huge artifacts everywhere.

[jagabo]

You can leave the video interlaced. TVs know how to deal with it. Just be sure not to resize the video vertically and encode as interlaced with the correct field order.