Sony BR Player up-rez from DVD outstanding!

dxdy wrote on 11/21/2013, 10:46 AM

Wow, a Sony BR player’s up-rez is very, very good.

The local community center upgraded its media hardware from a very old Panasonic DVD player and Mitsubishi big screen behemoth to a Sony BR player and ceiling-mounted projector with a 121 inch diagonal screen.

At a monthly orientation for new dog park users, I have been showing 30 minutes of video shot on a SD HDV Sony prosumer camera 8 years ago. Mediainfo shows a bit rate of 29 Mbit, and of course my DVD was limited to 9.2 Mbit.

Deciding to take advantage of the BR’s higher specs, I re-encoded from the original .veg files with an average 30 Mbit VBR. DVDA 5.2 claimed the bit rate was too high, so I used TMPGEnc Authoring tool to create the BR.

Big surprise – while the BR looks wonderful on the screen, the original DVD looks almost as good! The BR player is uprezzing the DVD really, really well. I can see the difference, but most of the passersby could not. They could hear a difference in the audio (BR was better), but I really don’t think the rework was worth the effort.

The DVD source files were created from MC DVDA templates.

Comments

larry-peter wrote on 11/21/2013, 10:55 AM

I have two very inexpensive Philips BD players that uprez very nicely too.

I had asked in another thread why the old rule of , "real-time hardware solutions are more expensive that offline software solutions" doesn't seem to apply to uprezzing. I have yet to find any software that comes near even the cheapest hardware in this department.

dxdy wrote on 11/21/2013, 11:13 AM

Now if there was only a way to pipe a file through the BR player and capture the uprezzed image...

videoITguy wrote on 11/21/2013, 11:53 AM

Excellent uprez from DVD in a Blu-ray player has been offered in the mid-line and up for about 4 years now. This was part of the plan to have every standard DVD player leave the customer and be replaced by Blu-ray hardware. The retail did not do a good job of selling this well...just ask Best Buy how it went? They will tell you!

There is no excuse for any standard DVD player to be in place- that is why I have been producing Blu-ray product for the last 6 years now. Even if a customer wants a standard DVD copy - I spec it and tell them that it should be played by a modern Blu-ray set-top.

john_dennis wrote on 11/21/2013, 2:35 PM

I have been using a Blu-ray player to play all of my files from a locally attached hard drive for a number of years.

I splurged on the last one, a Sony BDP-S790. It's probably the most satisfaction I've gotten for a $250 hardware purchase in a long time. I've spent a lot more on hardware and enjoyed it a lot less. For $100 spent on a Blu-ray player, most of the world should be well served.

Gary James wrote on 11/21/2013, 3:32 PM

"Wow, a Sony BR player’s up-rez is very, very good"

I have a Wireless Internet enabled Sony BD player I bought this past Spring. And it too does a beautiful job of up-converting my DVDs to 1080i. But I've noticed that in some scenes with a fast moving object centered in the screen, there's a distortion Halo or Cloud like effect that surrounds the object as the scene background scrolls by.

Usually this isn't so bad as to distract from the picture. But I happened to be watching a DVD where someone quickly moved past a wall covered with vertically striped wallpaper. The distortion cloud surrounding the moving person contained the wallpaper image, but it's stripes were out of sync with the paper outside the cloud. A very weird and noticeable anomaly.