Best way to watch DVD content on 4K TV?

[merkman]

I did some searching before I created this thread. Looked here in DVD movies, looked in TV shows, the 4K TV forums, and searched online with Google. Wasn't finding anything terribly helpful, and I'm a big Blu-Ray.com fan, so hoping someone won't mind providing some help / suggestions.

So I've gone to 4K. LG 55" E8 TV, Xbox One X, Nvidia Shield (4K), Apple TV 4K, and a Nakamichi soundbar with the firmware update to support Atmos audio. Obviously not as good as a "real" Atmos setup, but is better than without, and I'm in a small condo where I don't turn things up to 11, so it's good for my situation.

That said, I recently decided I wanted to watch "Las Vegas", it's a TV show from NBC, and it's only available on DVD. No Blu-Rays, no 4K. The trouble started when I went to watch my original US-discs. The first two seasons were produced on double-sided discs, you have to "flip" to watch all the episodes. Only my discs seem to have "laser rot" or whatever you want to call it, as they would skip, not play, etc.

Figured ripping might do better, but not really. The same errors seen in the "DVD Player" (game systems, etc.) were problematic in the PC drive. I quickly realized with these shows not available on US streaming services, I was going to have to buy new disc-based copies. Fine, if that's what it takes.

Reviewing prices online, it was clear UK copies were going to be a LOT cheaper than US ones. Amazon had seasons 1-4 of the show for $10 each, where each season in the US was $30-40. I purchased and waited for the UK episodes to arrive. This took a month or longer, as they didn't ship right away and standard shipping from Amazon UK to me is at least two weeks.

Once I got the discs, I confirmed they worked without issues, ripped them into my computer, and put the digital copies on my NAS. All this worked fine, except for the occasional episode being out of order. I'll worry about that eventually. In the meantime, It was after watching a few episodes, I started to get annoyed by the quality.

I get it, DVD wasn't created for a 4K TV, and I don't have the pixel for it to look "ideal". But the more episodes I watch (and I love these shows), the more disappointed I get. Enough so that I thought I'd do some looking online this morning.

Obviously some players upscale content better than others. But with my region 2 discs, trying to play them on most DVD players will cause issues. And while I see DVDFab 11 has a "converter" that will upscale DVD video to 4K... does it work? Almost ALL the reviews are on the DVDFab website, or covering OLDER versions, not the latest one. So I don't know WHAT to think about that software.

So that's where I'm at. Wondering if I need to re-rip my discs, because I should have ripped them at a higher quality? Is there no point, because I'd be "putting lipstick on a pig"? Or are there really upscalers that might be worthwhile?

Would love to hear your thoughts. If you made it all the way to the end, thanks for taking the time. Cheers!

[GreatGreg]

That's a lot to read.

Assuming you ripped your DVDs at full resolution (without compressing them with your DVDFab settings) you should have identical copies to whatever is on the discs.

After that, you can only upscale those images through your TV/player or with software from DVDFab as you describe. Both will probably yield similar results, but the advantage would probably be through DVDFab since they can upgrade their algorithms, while hardware cannot.

Having said that, the difference won't be all that great because your source material is probably the limiting factor.

I have had very good results with my TV upscaling DVD, but of course that also depends on your DVD source. TV shows like LAS VEGAS may not have been on film to begin with and may not have had great care taken to them when transferring them to DVD.

Try to play a modern new release DVD on your setup and you should be able to see what DVD is truly capable of with your upscaler.

[SillyG]

Upscaling is akin to snake oil, particularly if your only source is a DVD rip, and not a native SD master.

If you had a high quality SD master and were to convert that to DVD (MPEG-2), AVC, or HEVC, I could see the potential benefit and convenience in burning that conversion to a disc, but "upscaling" already heavily-compressed DVDs will only cause the overall quality to deteriorate further by subjecting it to, at the bare minimum, a third round of generation loss.

If you're one to fall for the placebo effect of a softer and/or artificially smoothed image (similar to DNR) and are inclined to think that that is superior to the originally supplied image, all the power to you. Magic DVD Ripper rips DVDs at their native quality, and you may be able to find software where you can burn those ripped files to a Blu-ray without any further compression, but I cannot make any firm recommendations concerning the latter, I'm afraid.

Earlier versions of Corel VideoStudio included "out-of-the-box" Blu-ray burning functionality (which allowed for burning of discs without recompression of compliant MPEG-2 files), but more recent versions have removed this feature, and the ability to burn Blu-rays now requires an additional purchase (it isn't particularly expensive, but it does add to the overall cost of the package). While customising menus is very limited, I have found this to work quite well in burning discs comprised of existing MPEG-2 material. However, I would suggest taking this with a grain of salt as there is likely to be better programs out there.

[zw94]

They have AI that can upscale images now, though the tech is too new to implement efficiently enough to upscale anything longer than a few frames.

Perhaps it would be best to wait a decade and hope that AI can upscale SD content to a satisfactory quality at a satisfactory pace?

If the tech becomes decent enough, we may even see studios adopt it to upgrade all the SD masters they would otherwise never to be able to upgrade.

[mastadge]

Originally Posted by zw94

They have AI that can upscale images now, though the tech is too new to implement efficiently enough to upscale anything longer than a few frames.

Weird. Could've sworn I have an acquaintance whose GAN software was uprezzing DVDs in realtime but I could be misremembering or misunderstanding.

[Lee A Stewart]

I have had excellent success watching DVDs that are "enhanced for 16x9 TVs" - ie anamorphic DVDs.

But for those that have an AR of 4x3 (1.33) like many TV shows on DVD, which are non-anamorphic, they are painful at best to watch. No upscaler is going to make a silk purse from a sows ear on those.

[SillyG]

Originally Posted by Lee A Stewart

But for those that have an AR of 4x3 (1.33) like many TV shows on DVD, which are non-anamorphic, they are painful at best to watch. No upscaler is going to make a silk purse from a sows ear on those.

It ought to be the other way around. Anamorphic DVDs are encoded at 720x576 or 720x480 resolution with the pixels stretched horizontally to fill the frame, regardless of whether the aspect ratio of the material is 4:3 or 16:9.

4:3 content, however, is presented truer to the source material than 16:9 content, in so far as the pixel aspect ratio is concerned. DVDs do not support 1:1 pixel aspect ratio (meaning that the pixels are *always* stretched horizontally and are not square-shaped). The truest to source, and the best-looking DVDs are 4:3 PAL content (that is, provided that the source material is native 4:3 PAL and are encoded from a high quality master) followed by native NTSC 4:3 content. In both cases, the pixels are *almost* square-shaped but not quite.

On the other hand, pixels in 16:9 content on DVD are stretched by almost 50% to fill a 16:9 frame and look softer as a result (though I imagine that 16:9 material is usually encoded from higher quality masters than 4:3 material, hence why 16:9 material may generally appear to look better, even though that is a matter of quality of the source, and not the format itself). Most 4:3 TV shows on DVD would likely be sourced from dated masters (from the 90s and prior) intended for viewing on CRT TVs and/or have been sourced from a video as opposed to film master, hence why they would not compare favourably to a modern production on DVD (the overwhelmingly majority of which are presented at 16:9 and are sourced from higher quality materials). HD/4K content cropped to 4:3 for DVD would objectively look better than the same content on DVD encoded at 16:9 (in terms of detail/sharpness/pixel integrity relative to the resolution), but of course there would be the obvious disadvantage of not being able to see the entire frame as intended by the producers/director.

[merkman]

Originally Posted by GreatGreg

That's a lot to read.

Assuming you ripped your DVDs at full resolution (without compressing them with your DVDFab settings) you should have identical copies to whatever is on the discs.

.

Greg - Sorry about the length. I'm definitely wordy, and wanted to be as clear as possible.

Didn't use DVDFab for ripping. Instead I used MakeMKV. They've been in beta for some time now, and the app is free while in Beta. Tried to check my settings and make sure I ripped the discs with the best audio and nixing subtitles. But unlike other apps, MakeMKV didn't give me advanced video options like a Handbrake would have. So I've been playing the MKV files via Plex from my Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield out to the LG OLED.

Didn't think using the DVDFab converter software to try and rip from DVD to an upscaled 4K transfer was going to help much, but I freely admit I'm no expert, and don't spend much time on video processing these days.

Many thanks to everyone who replied. I appreciate you taking the time.

[thatguamguy]

As far as I understand it, MakeMKV doesn't add any further compression, so that shouldn't be making anything worse.

But wouldn't using PAL discs mean that whatever app you play the videos through has to do the PAL/NTSC conversion on the fly? That seems like it would have an impact on the PQ, in addition to the PAL speedup. (I'm not sure, because I have avoided ripping PAL discs unless the material is native-PAL.)

[GreatGreg]

Originally Posted by merkman

Greg - Sorry about the length. I'm definitely wordy, and wanted to be as clear as possible.

Didn't use DVDFab for ripping. Instead I used MakeMKV. They've been in beta for some time now, and the app is free while in Beta. Tried to check my settings and make sure I ripped the discs with the best audio and nixing subtitles. But unlike other apps, MakeMKV didn't give me advanced video options like a Handbrake would have. So I've been playing the MKV files via Plex from my Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield out to the LG OLED.

Didn't think using the DVDFab converter software to try and rip from DVD to an upscaled 4K transfer was going to help much, but I freely admit I'm no expert, and don't spend much time on video processing these days.

Many thanks to everyone who replied. I appreciate you taking the time.

DVDFab has a direct rip option or a compressed rip option to compress a disc to a 4.7 GB file instead of an 8.5 GB file. DVDFab is also free and is easier to use than Handbrake although Handbrake will give you every option under the sun.

All I am saying is that if you ripped the image file at full size, you will get all you can from the disc itself. After that, it is up to either (a) post-processing image algorithms in software or (b) hardware upscalers such as those in your BD player to improve the image.

Of course it can't create an image where there isn't one to begin with. You will not see additional details that aren't in the original rip. However, it can smooth out the image and add fake detail by interpolating the pixels and it can do a pretty decent job if the source image is sharp.

I have watched many new release DVDs that have an excellent DVD transfer on my Pioneer with my player upscaling to HD.

I only realized that it was the player doing the upscaling when I watched the same disc on my $20.00 budget DVD player from China (which plays anything) that I realized how much work my player had done to improve the image.

[DVD Josh]

I have found that my X800m2 direct into the ZD9 for DVDs yields a solid picture. The 820 butchers DVDs for some reason, blows them out like contrast and brightness were meth.

[quirkmanly]

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