Making upscaled stuff... look less upscaled?

[iindigo]

Is there any way to make SD content feel a little nicer on high resolution screens? When I view my SD DVD rip of Clannad, the backgrounds and such look amazing - it absolutely kills the DTV rips. However, lines look aliased to all new levels, which is not the case if I fullscreen my old SS-Eclipse release; instead, while overall detail is lost, the lines on characters are considerably nicer and cleaner (comparable to an official upscale).

This also happens with a few of my other SD release (that currently have no HD counterparts). I'll post scaled screenshot comparisons in a bit.


Can I perhaps use Mplayer with some filters enabled? For example, I toyed with smartblur a little yesterday, and while it helped a little I didn't know enough of what I was doing to produce satisfactory results.

Also, while I'm here, is there an Mplayer filter than helps with halos?

[mgz]

eh i find that when i use haali to render my videos when watching they look MUCH nicer regardless of the quality

[kureshii]

Can I perhaps use Mplayer with some filters enabled? For example, I toyed with smartblur a little yesterday, and while it helped a little I didn't know enough of what I was doing to produce satisfactory results.

No filter that I know of (unless you have certain preferences in filtering, e.g. sharpening), but lanczos scaling makes things look much better ('-sws 9' in mplayer-nogui, or enable software scaling option in SMPlayer). You'd definitely want it over bilinear upscaling unless your CPU can't handle it.

[namaiki]

Please. Try MadVR (it is a video renderer) with CCCP (well it doesn't have to be with CCCP, but I can't remember what else supports it).

MadVR does not (by default) sharpen the image, but IMO gives a CRT kind of effect (what I mean is, you won't see PIXELS but an image). Very desirable.

[iindigo]

Please. Try MadVR (it is a video renderer) with CCCP (well it doesn't have to be with CCCP, but I can't remember what else supports it).

MadVR does not (by default) sharpen the image, but IMO gives a CRT kind of effect (what I mean is, you won't see PIXELS but an image). Very desirable.

Forgot to add, this all on a Mac, so no CCCP for me. That's exactly the kind of effect I'm talking about, though. Seeing massive aliased lines everywhere detracts so much from the experience, especially when the anime in question is meant to be a visual feast.

Thanks for the suggestion, kureshii. I'll try it and report back. My CPU is a quad-core 2.66Ghz Core i5 and the build of Mplayer I use is the 64bit multi-threaded variety, so I doubt CPU power will be a problem.

[iindigo]

First of all... sorry for the double post!

But after trying out that scaling method, it does indeed help and doesn't tax my system (Mplayer uses around ~30% of the total 400% of available CPU). Now the only problem is haloing strong enough to kill a person -_- a little sharpening wouldn't hurt, either.

Are there any other filters you suggest? If not, is there some place where I can just read up on all the different filters available in Mplayer?