M1330 HDMI Upscale?

Like most I am awaiting the my M1330 in anticipation...

As the M1330 does not have a blue ray drive, does it mean that the included drive will be capable of upscaling standard DVD's? Is there software available that can do this or is it purely a hardware thing?

 

Purely software. If you play a DVD on a screen with higher resolution than the original DVD, you are upscaling. This happens regardless of having HDMI or not.

 

I thought the DVD drive has to have an upscaling chip as well...At least this was true with the PS3 which was built with this chip but needed a firmware update to activate the upscaling features.

 

So, presuambly I can use the M1330 as a DVD player and the HDMI connection will mean that I will get an upscaled image on my LCD?

 

if you have software upscaling, yeah

 

A DVD drive does not need an upscaling chip to have video playback software on your PC to perform the upscaling. If you use Windows Media Player or another media player on your PC, those media software scale the video to a larger resolution when you watch in full-screen, hence upscaling.

Yes.*

Keep in mind that upscaling does not increase picture quality; it is an interpolation method to match a lower resolution video to a higher resolution. You can't get more accurate data when it doesn't exist in the first place.

*To be honest, I'm not sure how HDMI works in regards to this. Using DVI you can accomplish upscaling via media playback software. I'm not 100% sure you can achieve this using an HDMI output.

 

And what does that mean for the sound? Will the HDMI connection also carry the sound?

 

I would assume the HDMI ports on laptops do sound as well because the HDMI spec includes sound. I've had no experience with using HDMI and PCs so I can't comment with 100% certainty.

 

No one knows for sure yet. We'll know once the first home reviews start appearing...

 

Better upscalers like that found on the PS3 will not only scale the picture up but have complicated algorithms to fill in the additional pixels rather than simply using the color of pixels around it. On a PC this is a function of the software you use. Sophisticated DVD playing software may be able to do a lot of the decoding / upscaling in software while providing good picture quality/frame rates.

This is the functionality that you buy when you buy a upscaling DVD player vs a standard DVD player they can both display pictures on a large screen, the difference is how they fill in the additional pixels.

 

if you want to play the sound through hdmi, it's just the tv's speakers, right?
i want to use my stereo to play it, so i'm still stuck with connecting another cable from the aux in from the headphone port on the laptop?

 

HDMI audio delivers 5.1 Surround Sound tho... I think thats what they want...

 

I dunno why people keep asking about the HDMI sound. Right in the manual were it explains the ports it says

"HDMI connector — HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) connector carries an uncompressed all digital signal to produce hi-defination video and audio."

It would be weird to just put in the generic definition if it didn't also do the audio.

 

You are wrong there on both counts, buddy. Media Player and regular players in general do not "upscale", they simply blow up the picture to fill in the screen. Upscaling is a technical term which describes a process of filling in the missing bits of information to fill a bigger screen.

There are several ways to run upscaling on PC, different kinds of software. I'm aware of one, ffdshow which has some algorithms built-in to do upscaling but you do need a beefy cpu to make it happen and, AFAIK, it works only with some specific players. And yes, upscaling does improve picture quality, depending on how good the upscaling algorithm is.