Sorry about starting a second thread on this, but the title of the original may lead to it being ignored by many and I think this is rather important!
It seems with some (possibly all, needs testing) U-Control discs PowerDVD downsamples the video to SD (720x480) and performs telecine frame rate conversion to facilitate U-Control PiP even if all those features are turned off! Staggering and not very easy to spot, since just about the only way to find out is to have a very attuned and confident eye(!) or use Reclock, which reports the resolution and frame rate of the video being displayed.
The PowerDVD OSD shows normal HD codecs and bitrates when this is happening and the video card upscales to screen resolution, so you still end up with a 1920x1080 picture, just upscaled SD instead of the HD you paid for!
This is my original thread on the topic:
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=13657
Working on a hunch that U-Control might be responsible for a problem with Bourne Ultimatum I disabled the UControl subvideos in the xpls in the appropriate subfolder of the AnyDVDHD folder ("magic file replacement"). I then played the movie and hey presto Reclock showed 1920x1080@23.976 instead of 720x480@29.97fps!!!
Just to check I was not going mad I renamed my edited ADV_OBJ and restored the original. I started the disk and once again 720x480!!!
Changed back to my new folder and I'm back to 1920x1080 again.
There is no question this problem exists with this disc, the only question is if it affects ALL U-Control discs. As I say this can be hard to spot. Because PowerDVD is working with very good source material even the upscaled picture is pretty good, especially for a "gritty" film like Bourne Ultimatum. There are no MPEG artifacts to appear in the final image and it is hard to separate artistic intent from the effects of downsampling if you are not able to directly compare the two.
I would be very interested in some independent verification of this with the same disc or other U-Control discs.
In case it is version specific, I have done my testing with v3730 of PowerDVD.
Jon
It seems with some (possibly all, needs testing) U-Control discs PowerDVD downsamples the video to SD (720x480) and performs telecine frame rate conversion to facilitate U-Control PiP even if all those features are turned off! Staggering and not very easy to spot, since just about the only way to find out is to have a very attuned and confident eye(!) or use Reclock, which reports the resolution and frame rate of the video being displayed.
The PowerDVD OSD shows normal HD codecs and bitrates when this is happening and the video card upscales to screen resolution, so you still end up with a 1920x1080 picture, just upscaled SD instead of the HD you paid for!
This is my original thread on the topic:
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=13657
Working on a hunch that U-Control might be responsible for a problem with Bourne Ultimatum I disabled the UControl subvideos in the xpls in the appropriate subfolder of the AnyDVDHD folder ("magic file replacement"). I then played the movie and hey presto Reclock showed 1920x1080@23.976 instead of 720x480@29.97fps!!!
Just to check I was not going mad I renamed my edited ADV_OBJ and restored the original. I started the disk and once again 720x480!!!
Changed back to my new folder and I'm back to 1920x1080 again.
There is no question this problem exists with this disc, the only question is if it affects ALL U-Control discs. As I say this can be hard to spot. Because PowerDVD is working with very good source material even the upscaled picture is pretty good, especially for a "gritty" film like Bourne Ultimatum. There are no MPEG artifacts to appear in the final image and it is hard to separate artistic intent from the effects of downsampling if you are not able to directly compare the two.
I would be very interested in some independent verification of this with the same disc or other U-Control discs.
In case it is version specific, I have done my testing with v3730 of PowerDVD.
Jon
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