Originally posted by: lordjedi

Originally posted by: totsugeki
"To answer see you auntie's question, typically the DVD player does the upconverting, though I understand there are TVs that do it too."

Every fixed-pixel* display "upconverts". How else would they be able to fit 720x480** standard definition to their 1366x768*** native resolution?

By stretching the picture? Which is why a DVD looks like garbage on a 50"+ TV. I don't notice it on mine because my TV is across the room. My cousin notices it on his 65" HDTV because he's much closer to his TV than I am to mine.

So no, it's not being "upconverting" if it's just stretching the picture. It's upconverting it if it's resizing it and then sampling all the pixels to make the image look smoother. Real upconverting players and TVs look halfway decent. The ones that simply stretch the picture look bad.

"Stretching" and "upconverting" are the same thing. They both mean resampling (interpolating) the image to a different pixel count. There are countless image resampling methods. Some are crap, some are awesome, but like I said, why assume that every DVD player has a better resampling ("upconverting") implementation than any display? Even if your television does a crappy job at it, it's still "upconverting". If it looks like scheisse, it's probably using a "nearest neighbor" method, which makes the image look pixelated. For examples of more advanced "upconverting" algorithms, see http://www.general-cathexis.com/interpolation.html