Does the Blueray Drive upscale DVDs?

So i got the 1640 with blueray, and I was messing around with different applications like PowerDVD and media center, and I notice there isn't an up-conversion option. I know that all blueray players out there upscale and it supposedly makes quite a difference. So does anyone know anything about that?

 

I'm pretty sure it is the media player you are using that does the "upscaling"

AFAIK upscaling is just resizing the resolution of the DVD to that of the screen you are using.

Anyone else care to expand on this?

But in short, if you play a DVD fullscreen on your laptop, it should have already been "upscaled"

Hope this helps

 

Upscaling is a term used to describe Blu-Ray and DVD players that connect to TVs and is used completely randomly when talking about PC / Laptop playback.

A DVD has a low resolution by modern standards - 720×480 or 720×576. HDTVs and any modern PC monitor have a much larger number of pixels than this - e.g. even the laptop I'm using, which is 4.5 years old, has a resolution of 1280x800. In order to display a low resolution image on a high resolution screen, the image has to be "upscaled" at some point - otherwise it simply doesn't fill the screen.

With a conventional ("non-upscaling") DVD player connected to an HDTV, this happens in the TV. The TV isn't necessarily particularly good at doing this, and some DVD and Blu-Ray players (known as 'upscaling' players) instead increase the resolution themselves. A good Blu-Ray player might use more complicated algorithms to increase the size of the picture than the TV does. The output from the Blu-Ray or DVD player will then be in high resolution (e.g. 720p or 1080i/p) and the TV simply displays this more directly to the pixels it has on screen. Whether this looks better than letting the TV do the scaling depends completely on whether the TV's scaling or the player's scaling is better.

When you play a DVD or Blu-Ray on a PC, the drive itself doesn't do anything to do with image processing - it just reads the digital data on the disk. Any processing is done by the software on the computer. This includes scaling the image to fill the screen. Any software that plays DVDs does 'upscaling' in that it increases the size of the image to fill the pixels on the screen. That software might be rubbish at it or it might be good. Most of the time it is average and not configurable (as you have noticed, there aren't any settings in PowerDVD), and I expect that the Dell DVD player software included with a Dell laptop is comfortably average. If you hunt around on the internet, people desperately interested in image quality spend a lot of time setting up ffdshow (essentially software for upscaling that works alongside some software DVD players). Have a hunt if you're interested in getting a really good picture.

And to clarify what others have said, a Blu-Ray disk doesn't need to be 'upscaled' - it already has enough pixels to fill the screen, whereas information can't be 'created' from a DVD. Upscaling just tries to make a small image fill a large screen in the prettiest way possible, but it can't create detail that doesn't exist in the original.

 

Those using supported nVidia GPUs also have Purevideo HD, which is designed to play HD content, but also upscales SD content to your display resolution and interpolates the image. The interpolation process is essentially how anti-aliasing works. It grabs surrounding pixels, and then creates an interpolated images that is higher quality than simply 'zooming' the screen in. I believe the method nVidia uses is the BiCubic smooth method.

 

PinkPig explains it pretty well.

Just to give you the link to know what he's talking about:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=719041

The term upscaling in the HTPC domain does NOT equal bilinear/bicubic scaling.