I have a pretty large DVD and Blu-Ray collection, and I play all of them with a Blu-Ray player. When I play my DVDs on there, they look nice and sharp, definitely not Blu-Ray quality but still very nice, while when I play an uncompressed DVD rip on VLC Media Player it looks, well, like a DVD. I know my Blu-Ray player isn’t actually adding any detail, and it doesn’t have that weird artificial sharpness, so what is it doing?
In: Technology
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The upscaling software maps the pixels from the original frame to new locations in the upscaled frame. This results in ‘gaps’ in the upscaled frame that then needs to be filled in. The missing pixels then get filled in with the average color and brightness of the neighboring pixels.
More advanced upscaling algorithms analyze the original frame for patterns that can make the process more efficient, while also reducing artifacting and distortion that upscaling may introduce.
Image is made from pixels. Pixels are small squares.
You can triple the width and height of an image and it will be exactly the same, with the squares just bigger – each pixel of the image will now form a square from 9 pixels on your display.
Now you can use math to modify that new image. The central pixel is exactly the same as it was in the original image but you make the color of the pixels around it as some kind of average from the neighbors. You can then run even more math to make the borders between bright and dark parts more visible.
You repeat this process until the image is larger than your screen resolution and then use even more math to scale it down to the actual screen size.
Or you just use AI that was trained for this particular task.
You have a pixel. You turn that into four pixels in a square shape. You’ve just upscaled the pixel. That’s the simplest upscaling, but it tends to look blocky. So they use algorithms to smooth out the differences. You had a white pixel next to a black pixel, so maybe they don’t do four white and four black, but throw some grey pixels in there to make it look smoother. That will look better in a soft natural life scene, but it will also make hard boundaries (like when overlaying text) look a little fuzzy.
How does this affect the quality? Does it end up being decent?
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