For real-time viewing, you’re probably better off with the external hardware processors you are currently using. (You don’t say which LD player you have - this is the most important part of the chain!)
However, there are some improvements that you can do with a capture and post-processing that are not possible in real-time, eg:
- multiple capture average/median, to remove dot crawl, random noise and dropouts without damaging detail
- use a high quality motion compensated deinterlacer (too slow in software for real-time viewing)
- even better, for film-based content with 3:2 pulldown you can carry out IVTC to get a true 24p output (although some hardware processors can detect a pulldown pattern and do this in realtime, maybe the VP50 does?)
I have a couple of different players but mainly I use a CLD-97 w/ AC3 mod and a Runco LJRII. I just added a Darbee DVP5000s to end of the chain so it looks very good but I still thought a PC would have more power and be able to do good things. Thanks for the reply BTW.