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Hard upscaling vs real time upscaling

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Slysoft:
When watching older shows of which the highest quality available is 480p, you have one of two choices: watch in a windowed player or have the player upscale to fullscreen; the latter of which 99% of the time results in a lot of artifacting and eye cancer. Would hard upscaling (encoding the file in 1080p) result in less artifacting than trying to have the player upscale in real time? I'd think that it would, simply due to the nature of it.

Bob2004:

--- Quote from: Slysoft on August 21, 2012, 05:41:41 AM ---When watching older shows of which the highest quality available is 480p, you have one of two choices: watch in a windowed player or have the player upscale to fullscreen; the latter of which 99% of the time results in a lot of artifacting and eye cancer. Would hard upscaling (encoding the file in 1080p) result in less artifacting than trying to have the player upscale in real time? I'd think that it would, simply due to the nature of it.

--- End quote ---

Not really. There's no actual difference between having your player resize the video in realtime, and having an encoder resize it beforehand. Both are performing exactly the same operation. The only potential difference is that if it's done by an encoder, they can also run it through filters to attempt to remove artifacts/improve the quality. But, of course, these have their own problems as well, and whether they actually do anything for the quality at all is very much dependent on the video.

So, which is better needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis, but in the majority of cases, there's no real benefit to downloading an upscale as opposed to just resizing it in your player.

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