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If I output video from the internal DVD player of the PC through the DVI output of my video card, is it progressive or is it still interlaced? If it is still interlaced, how can I change it to progressive without relying on my display's deinterlacer? It seems my PC should be able to do it better since it has more computing power on which to draw.
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It's definitely progressive. Unless you specify it in the drivers (or a program called Powerstrip), whatever resolution you output is using all lines, all the time. AFAIK, all the deinterlacing is done by the DVD decoder (which is within and almost always by the same company that made the DVD player software) and/or the video card.
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And finally, how do you equate PC resolution to HD resolution? For instance, if I display a DVD from my PC at 1280 x 1024 resolution to a compatible front projector, is that considered HD, and if so, which setting (480p, 540p, 720p) is it equal to?
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It's not technically considered HD unless it's actually using one of the HD resolutions (1280x720p, 1920x1080i, or 1920x1080p). Otherwise, it's just a computer resolution.
The important thing to remember about post-processing is that it operates only within the image that is sent by the DVD. This is always either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL) lines. They are usually progressive, but some of them aren't mastered or "flagged) correctly. On my system, the DVD is first decoded and deinterlaced. In this case, I'm using the nVidia decoders that came with TheaterTek 2, through a 3rd-party player (ZoomPlayer). PowerDVD and WinDVD both include proprietary decoders. There is also a freeware decoder from the DScaler folks. Next, a open-source program called ffdshow resizes (output is changed from 720x480 to 1440x960), denoises, and sharpens the image with a Lanczos algorithm. Finally, my video card scales the image to fit within the output specified (1024x768, for instance). All of this takes a significant amount of processing, so make sure your computer can handle it. My AMD64 3200+ and 6800GT are able to handle it, but there's not headroom for much else to be going on.