standard 720x480 DVD to Avi 720P with free converter?

[MilesAhead]

So far I haven't run into any free converters that input DVD and output avi HD. Just wondering if there's such a beast. Even if the output was only 720P I'd be curious to mess around with it.

[manono]

An AviSynth script with the resizing done fed into VDub(Mod) (free) can easily do it. I might question why you'd want to, though.

[jman98]

I am absolutely amazed that after almost 5 years of being a member here and 150+ posts that you don't understand what's wrong with this question. Yes, it certainly is possible to blow up NTSC DVD resolution to 720p, but it will look like crap. There's no demand for such a program so it doesn't exist.

[guns1inger]

720 x 480 vs 1280 x 720 : Why bother ?

That said, it can be done for free - Xvid4PSP will do it

[jagabo]

In case it's not clear: upscaling the frame size will not increase the quality.

[MilesAhead]

An AviSynth script with the resizing done fed into VDub(Mod) (free) can easily do it. I might question why you'd want to, though.

Because I'm curious and like to try things. I don't assume I know everything already. Amazing as it may be.

But I know I've often converted a DVD to a standard avi then played on an upconverting dvd player. Would it not stand to reason if one had more bits to start with, converting from the source with more bits rather than just upconverting from a standard size .avi, wouldn't you get more out of it?

I don't know. But I'm going to try it myself. I'm weird like that. I try things instead of just believing crap I'm told.

[guns1inger]

Look at VideoEnhancer, which is probably the cheapest software upscaler around and works a lot like virtualdub

[EddyH]

An AviSynth script with the resizing done fed into VDub(Mod) (free) can easily do it. I might question why you'd want to, though.

Because I'm curious and like to try things. I don't assume I know everything already. Amazing as it may be.

But I know I've often converted a DVD to a standard avi then played on an upconverting dvd player. Would it not stand to reason if one had more bits to start with, converting from the source with more bits rather than just upconverting from a standard size .avi, wouldn't you get more out of it?

I don't know. But I'm going to try it myself. I'm weird like that. I try things instead of just believing crap I'm told.

That can be a good way of discovering stuff, but what you're doing here is ignoring the experienced advice of many people who have already been on that kind of voyage of discovery. Don't be the video analogue of the kind of guy who joins a biking messageboard asking whether a Hayabusa or a Fireblade is the best choice for a first bike, and huffily ignores the chorus of "don't have a superbike as your first ride - start with something closer to a moped!". Then goes off and gets killed.

OK the results won't be anywhere near as fatal, but you'll still be wasting your time for no good reason. The only time you'd want to do something like this is inserting SD clips into a mainly HD production that's going to remain HD in its final version.

For a good example of what you'll actually get out of it, I can show you some clips from the filming I did recently where I had to do what was effectively a digital zoom into a full-frame video to focus on certain members of a question-asking audience captured with a non-PTZ camera. Even though none of the zooms went much past 2x, the result looks horrendous and I'm not sure if it wouldn't have been better just leaving it as-is.

EDIT:
Also, if you're wanting "more bits" to feed to your upconverting player, well...
a/ why not just feed it the DVD in the first place? If you're -ahem- copying one you don't own, then it's possible to just dupe the original directly after all, and it's cheap.
b/ if AVI is an absolute requirement, you'd be far, far better sticking with the original resolution but increasing the bitrate. That way each pixel has more data assigned to it and won't look quite as rotten when upscaled. A lot of AVI conversions REDUCE from DVD rez after all, so just setting it to 1:1 and choosing a suitable compression level may be enough to make things look far better.
Increasing the resolution along with the bitrate will, at best, make little difference once it's gone through the upscaling process. Increasing the resolution alone make it look worse and be the opposite of what you want. Don't make the mistake of confusing "pixels" with "bits" when it comes to lossy-compressed digital video. The two are completely unconnected apart from more of one requiring more of the other to have similar perceptual quality.

[creamyhorror]

But I know I've often converted a DVD to a standard avi then played on an upconverting dvd player. Would it not stand to reason if one had more bits to start with, converting from the source with more bits rather than just upconverting from a standard size .avi, wouldn't you get more out of it?

A few effects at play:
1) (theoretically) More detail preserved by a larger framesize
2) Errors/quality reduction due to resizing
3) Slightly better upscaling if a better upscaler is used prior to encode

Overall, it seems that any benefits of a larger framesize and a better upscaler get balanced out by the reduction in quality due to resizing, and more importantly the smoothing effect of encoding erodes the gains. Furthermore, it takes much more bitrate - which might have been better spent on encoding at the original framesize.

I don't know. But I'm going to try it myself. I'm weird like that. I try things instead of just believing crap I'm told.

Sure, go ahead and try it, but don't discount other people's advice and information (even if it's given peremptorily).

[EddyH]

A few effects at play:
1) (theoretically) More detail preserved by a larger framesize

I'm not quite sure I understand where you're coming from here. The original image has 704 or 720 columns-worth of detail and 480 to 576 rows of detail. If you resample this to a larger size, you still have between a 704x480 and 720x576 matrix of picture information, just smeared across a larger area. If you have a very, very good upscaling algorithm that's too intense to use in realtime, and is worth the increased bitrate you'll have to throw at it to avoid losing any tentative benefit from increased quantising & DCT artefacts, it may look better than what the display's hardware can manage. But it still won't be more detailed. It'll just stretch the original in a smoother and less obvious way.

And let's run the maths. If you have, say, a 720x480 DivX (appropriately set to anamorphic for widescreen material, and a playback device that recognises the flag) which looks as good as the DVD at 1mbps (possible, if it's encoded really well)... rough back-of-an-envelope maths says that after upscaling to 1280x720 (assuming both are 30fps progressive), you'll need 2.67mps. 1080p, 6mbps. Which is probably about as much bandwidth as the DVD uses itself. And there's all the conversion time involved.

Seems like a bit of a false economy. My vote in the "my DivXs don't look good enough on my big TV" election is increasingly towards just using a DVD source in the first place. Most upscalers are pretty good these days; I've got no problem with how PAL SD material looks on my 32" WXGA, for a start. Or increasing your encoding bitrate - increasing it by 50-100% over whatever your default is will probably improve the picture far more than unneccessary upscaling (and the requisite rez increase) could manage, and still not take up as much space as 720p would.

That, or get hold of a HD source (whether it be Blu-ray, HDDVD or AVI) in the first place?

[MilesAhead]

That can be a good way of discovering stuff, but what you're doing here is ignoring the experienced advice of many people who have already been on that kind of voyage of discovery. Don't be the video analogue of the kind of guy who joins a biking messageboard asking whether a Hayabusa or a Fireblade is the best choice for a first bike, and huffily ignores the chorus of "don't have a superbike as your first ride - start with something closer to a moped!". Then goes off and gets killed.

That kind of thinking is why, when the in house crowd can't solve an issue, a consultant is brought in from outside who doesn't know "you can't do it that way." And maybe tries it that way, but with his own twist.

For the helpful suggestions of "just play the DVD in the first place" perhaps it never occurred to you that not all DVDs are made 16x9 anamorphic. I have several foreign films from the 90s that are 4:3 letterboxed. AutoGK on it's own with autocropping convertes them, in most cases, to output that looks much better on a 16x9 TV. Why not try to produce one directly to HD?

Most things tried don't work. So it will probably fail. But already I've found out about several softwares I wasn't aware of. It's an impetus for learning.

Thanks for the replies.

[yoda313]

I have several foreign films from the 90s that are 4:3 letterboxed. AutoGK on it's own with autocropping convertes them, in most cases, to output that looks much better on a 16x9 TV. Why not try to produce one directly to HD?

Simply put you are not making it hd. You are stretching it to hd proportions but it is not hd it is still sd in hd frame.

For those instances you are far better off using the original dvd and using either the dvd/bluray players internal zoom modes to properly stretch the picture without distortion OR use the internal zoom functions of your tv.

I have done that with my xbox 360 with letterboxed dvds and they look perfect on my hdtv (The 360 has a variety of zoom functions). But my tv also has three zoom features to properly crop a letterboxed video.

It is most often best to use the simplest technique available to you then to waste time and effort to get something with reduced quality.

[jagabo]

There's nothing wrong with the OP wanting to try it for himself. It won't cost him anything but a little time and a few pennies worth of electricity.

[yoda313]

I'm not against the effort of trying. That's where most of your learning occurs. It's just the need to temper expectations. You won't make a dvd look like a bluray simply by forcing it to 720p. And it is so much simpler to use a zoom on a hdtv or player and you don't have to do anywork and you get the best upconverting you can get with your player or tv and no work is involved.

[MilesAhead]

I think several people are missing the point. The DVD player upconverts the .avi when I play it. If the firmware in the player can upconvert it, cannot some software? I mean, there must be some algorithm happening in the player other than zoom.

Then the question becomes, can I find some free software that will upconvert better than the DVD player firmware?

Well, that's not it exactly. The question is, can I get a better result converting to 720P avi than converting to a 480P avi? If not, why not? The .avi itself with fewer bits to offer than the DVD source is upconverted by the player. Seems like the closer you get to the source the better the result should be, generally speaking.

[MilesAhead]

I have several foreign films from the 90s that are 4:3 letterboxed. AutoGK on it's own with autocropping convertes them, in most cases, to output that looks much better on a 16x9 TV. Why not try to produce one directly to HD?

Simply put you are not making it hd. You are stretching it to hd proportions but it is not hd it is still sd in hd frame.

For those instances you are far better off using the original dvd and using either the dvd/bluray players internal zoom modes to properly stretch the picture without distortion OR use the internal zoom functions of your tv.

I have done that with my xbox 360 with letterboxed dvds and they look perfect on my hdtv (The 360 has a variety of zoom functions). But my tv also has three zoom features to properly crop a letterboxed video.

It is most often best to use the simplest technique available to you then to waste time and effort to get something with reduced quality.

My old OPPO player had a nice 1.2 zoom that worked great for 4x3 input that was 16-by-9-ified by the player. I miss that mode. Unfortunately I'm doing Philips now and they want to go 2x or greater, or shrink it. I haven't seen another player with 1.2 zoom. Don't know why they don't all have it.

On my TV the video looks much better if the input is 16x9 even if it's been converted to avi to get there. Believe me, I watched the letterboxed DVDs before I went through 2 hours of conversion to get the .avi files. The avi look much better or I wouldn't bother.

[creamyhorror]

If you upscale and encode to a 720p video, the final output will always look worse than the original DVD upscaled (with the same scaler) to 720p and played back. The DVD source is the upper limit of how good any encode can look, and it isn't a very high bar.

Any potential improvement from upscaling before encoding has to come from using a superior scaler during encode (not like the difference is very big between the available options), and from using a lot more bitrate. The required boost in bitrate alone (2-2.67x as EddyH said) is inefficient, and you'd have been better served by simply encoding at a higher bitrate at the original resolution in the first place.

I mean, there must be some algorithm happening in the player other than zoom.

Then the question becomes, can I find some free software that will upconvert better than the DVD player firmware?

'Upconvert' is pretty meaningless to me. There are various kinds of 'zoom' (upscaling), and there are various filters that can be applied to video that change or improve its appearance, increase its compressibility, etc. That's what Avisynth filtering is all about. If what you're imagining is denoising/dehaloing and sharpening prior to encode, then that's what lots of hobbyists do already - but most don't add upscaling to the mix, because it isn't efficient in terms of perceptual gain in video quality.

Anyway, no point speculating about possibilities - go do some upscaled encodes with whatever tools you can find and tell us if you can get any improvement without bumping up the bitrate too much.

On my TV the video looks much better if the input is 16x9 even if it's been converted to avi to get there. Believe me, I watched the letterboxed DVDs before I went through 2 hours of conversion to get the .avi files. The avi look much better or I wouldn't bother.

I'm doubtful, unless your player was doing something stupid like deinterlacing telecined DVDs, or using a lousy deinterlacer on interlaced DVDs. If it's a normal inverse telecine process performed on telecined DVDs, the original is going to look better than a re-encoded AVI. (You are watching them full-screen, right?)

[jagabo]

It's not like the days when most devices used a nearest neighbor or simple bilinear algorithm to scale digital video. HDTVs and upscaling DVD players now do a decent job. There are better, more time consuming, algorithms but the increase in quality (decrease in artifacts) is very small over what HDTVs are currently doing.

Also keep in mind that your HDTV is probably going to scale your 720p input again before it hits the screen. Each digital scaling will result in more scaling artifacts.

AviSynth is free and has lots of scaling algorithms including BilinearResize, BicubicResize, BlackmanResize, GaussResize, LanczosResize, Lanczos4Resize, PointResize, Spline16Resize, Spline36Resize, and Spline64Resize. VirtualDub (also free) has some of those and a few poorer ones.

Someone already pointed out VideoEnhancer which has a super resolution technique which looks at multiple frames and tries to smooth out jaggies. The technique works with some material, not with others.

[MilesAhead]

720 x 480 vs 1280 x 720 : Why bother ?

That said, it can be done for free - Xvid4PSP will do it

I tried this again and it did mux. I must have hit a setting early on the first time.

[MilesAhead]

It's not like the days when most devices used a nearest neighbor or simple bilinear algorithm to scale digital video. HDTVs and upscaling DVD players now do a decent job. There are better, more time consuming, algorithms but the increase in quality (decrease in artifacts) is very small over what HDTVs are currently doing.

Also keep in mind that your HDTV is probably going to scale your 720p input again before it hits the screen. Each digital scaling will result in more scaling artifacts.

AviSynth is free and has lots of scaling algorithms including BilinearResize, BicubicResize, BlackmanResize, GaussResize, LanczosResize, Lanczos4Resize, PointResize, Spline16Resize, Spline36Resize, and Spline64Resize. VirtualDub (also free) has some of those and a few poorer ones.

Someone already pointed out VideoEnhancer which has a super resolution technique which looks at multiple frames and tries to smooth out jaggies. The technique works with some material, not with others.

You make good points. I tried a couple of input avi clips with VideoEnhancer and the output was pixelated for both. It does look like something that will work better in hardware. If nothing else now I have to play around with XVid4PSP for awhile just generally to see what it can do for me. I tried it to upscale a clip sliced from a DVD to 720P but the player didn't want to play it. Kept halting the video while the audio went on. Rebuilding frames made no difference.

Oh well. Looks like 264 is the way to go when possible. AutoGK still seems the best way to 16-by-9-ify my letterboxed DVDs. But I've already converted most of those that were decent enough quality to process.

[jagabo]

I tried a couple of input avi clips with VideoEnhancer and the output was pixelated for both.

That could be because the source had macroblocks and they were upscaled along with the rest of the picture (a deblocking filter might help with that). Or maybe you used insufficient bitrate for the upscaled video.

It does look like something that will work better in hardware.

There is no magic in hardware. Anything done in hardware can be done in software (and in fact was prototyped in software first). The advantage of hardware is circuitry dedicated to the process, and hence speed (or at least offloading the CPU).

I tried it to upscale a clip sliced from a DVD to 720P but the player didn't want to play it. Kept halting the video while the audio went on.

What player were you using? Normal Divx/DVD players can only handle SD frame sizes.

Oh well. Looks like 264 is the way to go when possible.

h.264 is the best choice for most video -- if your player supports it. Unfortunately it takes much longer to encode than Divx/Xvid. x264 is the best h.264 implementation right now.

AutoGK still seems the best way to 16-by-9-ify my letterboxed DVDs.

I would use x264, leave the frame at 720x480 (maybe crop away borders), and use PAR/DAR flags to set the display aspect ratio.

[vhelp]

Just remember, that when you upscale to 1280x720p, that you do so the way spec do it:

if 24p->60p film, make the frame rate PDPDD PDPDD PDPDD, ...

if 30i/p->60p video, make the frame rate PpPpPpPpPp, ...

for either of these, this way the video is smooth playing. When film, most tv display chips follow this pattern more accurately and cleanly and produces smooth video. When anything else, it has to incorporate complicated guessing algos and the video begins looking like caca.

ps1: here, avisynth is your friend.
pd2: also adding, that the advice above is correct.. in most cases leaving the source in original state is best because it is at its best. But, if your source contains artifacts (mpeg errors etc) then it is likely that you will enhance or exagerate them when you upscale and re-encode because more than likely you will not encode with a high enough bitrate. There are people who still think that divx/xvid/youtube is high quality. So, its important, that if you try you hand at this endeavor that you make sure you use a high bitrate else you'll be enhancing the sources artifacts, and believe it, i'm pretty sure your source has'em.

-vhelp 5368

[MilesAhead]

There is no magic in hardware. Anything done in hardware can be done in software (and in fact was prototyped in software first). The advantage of hardware is circuitry dedicated to the process, and hence speed (or at least offloading the CPU).

That thought is why I wanted to mess with this in the first place.
Curiosity more than anything. I'm trying to move in the direction of
less processing rather than more, generally speaking though.

afa DVD to avi goes, I have 2 means to play them. WD set top box, and
Philips DVD upscaling divx player. Since the WD will play >720x576 res
I thought why not see if I can convert to 720P. But it seems more work
than it's worth. The AutoGK output looks pretty good on both providing
the DVD source wasn't too horrid to start with. Some of those Asian flicks
made before 1990 aren't worth the processing time. The video is murky,
grainy and contains too many artifacts. But some produce fair output
when cropped. Of course some have been remastered and
released on BluRay such as the Stephen Chow flicks. The ones I'm
working on are inbetween. The source looks good enough that it's
worth processing, but it's obscure enough it's not likely to be released
in a superior format etc..



I appreciate the replies and perspectives offered.

[creamyhorror]

If you really want to experiment with improving video and have a lot of free time to do it, you shouldn't be looking at upscaling; you should be learning how to use Avisynth and experimenting with it. There's a reason we've mentioned it quite a few times already. With it you can remove bad noise and artifacts with smart motion-compensated filters, fix chroma problems, tweak hue and sat, double resolution with NNEDI2, and all manner of other things. If you're interested, grab AvsPmod and Avisynth, then start reading Doom9's Avisynth Usage forum.

[EddyH]

A late two-pennorth: No love lost between me and consultants at the moment. Particularly ones coming in to an entrenched establishment where we know quite well what we're already doing, what our clients want, and what we can afford to buy and support, who then try to "mix it up" whilst displaying a rather obvious lack of knowledge about anything they're talking about and produce a completely ridiculous brief that we file under "shred" as politely as possible... having given the gits £10,000 we can ill afford for the trouble.

Don't get me wrong. Innovation? Good. Enquiry? Good. Both very good in fact.
But at the same time, experience, particularly experienced gained through own trial and error observation, or seeing other people screw up / waste their time on multiple occasions? Also good.
Being enquiring or innovative but blithely ignoring the advice of people who have been there, done that, and would rather you not end up doing similar even though it doesn't affect them either way what happens to you? Not good.

To turn the argument around, that kind of "screw that, I'm gonna try it anyway" attitude is why people still sometimes end up having to be resuced from Lion pens in zoos, having lost an arm wanting to pet the nice kitty despite the multitude of signs around the perimeter warning you that it's a dangerous, untamed animal that will kill you to death. (Yeah, a repeat of the motorbike one really, but perhaps a different metaphor will rub it in?)

As for the "well maybe you didn't consider x, y, z" thing ---- you never said. Not psychic, here. You have to reveal these things upfront if you want them considered.
(Hey ... are you actually my mother in disguise? )
.... If I have time I might re-read and see if I can offer more sensible suggestions in light of the new info rather than being snarky

Just on the "not all DVDs are made anamorphic" front, I can't really see how that changes matters. The core idea that increasing the pixel resolution from the source material will do jack squat for the end quality is not affected by whether it's anamorphic or letterboxed. So you might be going from 720x352 to 1280x720 (or 848x480) instead upscaling from 720x480; it's still the same process but with different inputs, same as my nasty-looking 320x256 to 720x576 blowups (which used Avisynth's absolute best quality resizer BTW). And most 16:9 TVs - with the exception of e.g. the primitive CRT one my Dad threw out last year after it had already been a second gen hand-me-down - have perfectly good "zoom" modes to cope with exactly that problem which, in essence, do exactly what you're planning to do but entirely automatically and on-the-fly. Or the DVD player might even do it. There's a flag in the standard where a 4:3 disc that's letterboxed is set as such, and hopefully the studio will do that and your player detect it and deal appropriately.

EDIT: From recent experience I can see ONE reason where you MAY want to try something like this - if you want the video full-frame but with subtitles readable that are otherwise lost off the bottom of the screen in the letterboxing. Resize the video to be fullframe anamorphic and either mux it back into the DVD, or make an AVI with the subtitles stripped off the DVD and laid over the top. All the same, it may first be worth seeing if the player can be conned into stretching your LB'd material to be anamorphic (and perhaps the separately-generated subtitle overlay, which doesn't change size for any reason usually, will then be in the "right" place once it reaches the TV). My cheap-cheap Lidl-bought player has an option for this which at least works some of the time in testing.

[MilesAhead]

I've used AviSynth small bits here and there. I know it can do a lot and haven't come close to plumbing it in any depth. It's a great tool. Many times I'll use a gui converter front end just to get the .avs scripts from it, then load it into the converter I want to use instead.

[MilesAhead]

Geez! So far I've been killed off mountain biking and locked into dens with dangerous animals!! Who knew video could be so treacherous!!! I mean, gimme' a break!

btw the smart consultants know the in-house guys are ignored because they're in-house, and will approach with the "I know it sucks they're ignoring your input, but if you want your changes implemented it might get done if we pretend I came up with it" routine.

The new guy in school is automatically hot if he's from another continent. Even if he looks like a dog that lost a fight.