Death blow to Toshiba's SRT/SUC/Res+ upconverter: It doesn't work in real-time! - Page 5 - Blu-ray Forum

Beta Man · 08-15-2008, 02:33 PM

I like Toshiba..... have a DVD player from them from about 1997 or 1998 that is still working great

I don't know why people are Anti-Toshiba for supporting a different format.... I love Sony Televisions... but don't care for their audio stuff. Same with Pioneer, great plasmas, but don't care for their audio stuff...

If Pioneer put out a set-top "Digital HD Download" box or whatever..... and people thought it was competition for Blu-ray, would you have the same hate for Pioneer (T.V.s, receivers, etc) as you do for Toshiba??? I just don't understand I guess. Some people actually thought there was a "war" ? wow... time to go outside, take a walk, read a book, etc... there is more to life than internet militias.

ckenisell · 08-15-2008, 02:37 PM

pwned.

ckenisell · 08-15-2008, 02:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beta Man

I just don't understand I guess.

I agree with you on that point.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beta Man

Some people actually thought there was a "war" ? wow... time to go outside, take a walk, read a book, etc... there is more to life than internet militias.

Um, it wasn't a war with bombs and guns and stuff. It was a format war. And Toshiba (along with Microsoft) played VERY dirty: Spreading lies, misinformation, half truths, etc. They even went as far as hiring people to bash Blu-Ray supporters on the internet (eh hem...av$forum anybody?). I was personally bashed for spreading the truth about Blu-Ray on such forums.

Now that Toshiba has lost the format war, they are trying to continue to battle it. It is blatently obvious what they are trying to do (this is no "set-top 'Digital HD Download' box" from Pioneer. This is a product they are aiming at potential Blu-Ray consumers.) I find their actions to lack integrity at the highest level. It's not business as usual for them. It's personal for Toshiba. Sony hurt their poor fragile egos.

So, excuse me for being anti-Toshiba. They deserve every bit of hate they get for this.

DrXym · 08-15-2008, 03:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBlacklow

Because it can't even do it in real-time for DVDs:

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=59425

I hate to sound like I'm defending Toshiba here... But the PS3's Cell manages decoding the audio and video, upscaling, deblocking and mosquito removal all in realtime.

If the PS3 can manage it, then the chances are that any Spurs equipped DVD or TV could too. Yes I know it has less SPUs and a lower clock, but then again it has hardware for decoding MPEG-2 & AVC and may well be working alongside a SoC of some kind

Personally I think SUC is a waste of time in a DVD player. Spurs chips were sampling at $100 and are unlikely to cost less than $50 any time soon. Toss in memory to hold a bunch of frames and it means any player is going to be pretty expensive, probably $150 up.

Toshiba should swallow their pride and stick the tech into a Blu Ray player. If its perceived as decent, they will sell far more boxes than they ever would for DVD.

Beta Man · 08-15-2008, 03:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ckenisell

pwned.

darn.... just got "out-geeked" I lose.... this is what I get for taking a rational stance on something so insignificant.....

By the way.... you still have all of this hate that "Toshiba earned" maybe you should hold resentment for Britain, Germany, Japan, the list goes on............

Boy if I ever meet a decendant of King George, he won't see it coming

Tok · 08-15-2008, 04:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrXym

I hate to sound like I'm defending Toshiba here... But the PS3's Cell manages decoding the audio and video, upscaling, deblocking and mosquito removal all in realtime.

If the PS3 can manage it, then the chances are that any Spurs equipped DVD or TV could too. Yes I know it has less SPUs and a lower clock, but then again it has hardware for decoding MPEG-2 & AVC and may well be working alongside a SoC of some kind

Personally I think SUC is a waste of time in a DVD player. Spurs chips were sampling at $100 and are unlikely to cost less than $50 any time soon. Toss in memory to hold a bunch of frames and it means any player is going to be pretty expensive, probably $150 up.

Toshiba should swallow their pride and stick the tech into a Blu Ray player. If its perceived as decent, they will sell far more boxes than they ever would for DVD.

Toshiba's engine is much different from a basic upscaler. It will sample groups of frames to interpolate a higher resolution frames during playback. The problem is interpolating is not always accurate especially with dynamic input. That's the reason this will probably require time for rendering and in the end is it worth it considering all the major studios are releasing true HD content on BD.

Granted it will take a few years for the BD library to get to the size of the current DVD library, but it will happen.

By the time Toshiba finally gets these players on the market, if ever, BD players will be at the $250 price point and these DVD players will have to cost at least the same if not more considering the technology to needed to render and store the films for playback.

Toshiba is just coming off as a whiny punk who takes their ball home after losing a game at the local playground.

One has to wonder if Toshiba has ever heard the of the KISS principle. I can see many consumers with a glazed look in their eyes when the local salesman tries to explain you pop the DVD in the machine and in a few short hours you have a HD title to watch. I am sure most will look at the BD players and realize you just put the disc in the player and hit play and you are watching a movie.

BD is going to have a huge holiday season due to the high profile titles hitting the format such as Godfather, TDK, Indy, Iron Man, etc. This will be the first holiday season BD is the sole HD format on the market. Factor in PS3's growing popularity and the sky is the limit.

dialog_gvf · 08-15-2008, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beta Man

I like Toshiba..... have a DVD player from them from about 1997 or 1998 that is still working great

I don't know why people are Anti-Toshiba for supporting a different format....

Well, for one thing they paid off Paramount to stop supporting Blu-ray a year ago. That pushed a bunch of people into the anti-Tosh camp.

I've never been impressed with Toshiba DVD players. Many had less than 500 lines of horizontal resolution output (versus the 540 possible from DVD).

Gary

Tok · 08-15-2008, 04:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ckenisell

They even went as far as hiring people to bash Blu-Ray supporters on the internet (eh hem...av$forum anybody?). I was personally bashed for spreading the truth about Blu-Ray on such forums.

True. What gets me is the amount the avs'ers were led astray. It's like anything that came out of Amir's mouth was gospel.

VC1 is the greatest invention since sliced bread and BD50 breaks the law of physics.

Heck that SOB still is held in some regard over there. He is just an engineer who has some knowledge to skew his argument to fit MSFT's agenda even though he is no longer on the MSFT payroll.

Some of his latest rant were on how lossless was just marketing spin and how hand tuned DACs from Mark Levinson with a lossy format were better than a true lossless system without touched by god DACs.

Sorry, there is a lot of snakeoil in the AV business, but hand tuned DACs ranks right up there with Monster cable marketing BS. The steps between levels is so small with 24-bit high resolution DACs, I don't think someone can handtune them reliably. Don't you think the mass produced DACs are being QA'd so you know you are getting a quality DAC?

Last I checked my Onkyo 805 has some of best Burr Brown DACs available, the 1796 chipset. Good DACs today are the rule not the exception.

Hisargument why lossless was not needed was just another veiled attack against BD. Typical Amir BS.

dialog_gvf · 08-15-2008, 04:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CraigW

One has to wonder if Toshiba has ever heard the of the KISS principle. I can see many consumers with a glazed look in their eyes when the local salesman tries to explain you pop the DVD in the machine and in a few short hours you have a HD title to watch. I am sure most will look at the BD players and realize you just put the disc in the player and hit play and you are watching a movie.

The whole thing comes off a pure desperation on Toshiba's part to maintain the cash cow of DVD royalties.

How are these going to be stored? On HDD? This comes back to the mass storage problem of downloads.

And, since they will never support a BD burner, there is no archival or portability (I expect the conversions would be locked to the box anyway).

Gary

john_1958 · 08-15-2008, 04:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lou-Cipher

This article cracks me up

The media asking questions that toshiba dont like to answer. Dont miss the second part of the article. http://techdigest.tv/2008/06/toshiba_controv.html

yeah what a joke lol
upscaling will never match hd resolution

Tok · 08-15-2008, 04:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dialog_gvf

Well, for one thing they paid off Paramount to stop supporting Blu-ray a year ago. That pushed a bunch of people into the anti-Tosh camp.

I've never been impressed with Toshiba DVD players. Many had less than 500 lines of horizontal resolution output (versus the 540 possible from DVD).

Gary

There were a lot of dirty tactics in the war. Thankfully the format that was truly next gen won.

Woody · 08-15-2008, 04:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CraigW

Some of his latest rant were on how lossless was just marketing spin and how hand tuned DACs from Mark Levinson with a lossy format were better than a true lossless system without touched by god DACs.

Sorry, there is a lot of snakeoil in the AV business, but hand tuned DACs ranks right up there with Monster cable marketing BS. The steps between levels is so small with 24-bit high resolution DACs, I don't think someone can handtune them reliably. Don't you think the mass produced DACs are being QA'd so you know you are getting a quality DAC?

Last I checked my Onkyo 805 has some of best Burr Brown DACs available, the 1796 chipset. Good DACs today are the rule not the exception.

No offense, (I dislike Amir as much as the next guy) but it is easy to find DACs that decode 2 ch music better than the DACs in many of today's receivers. You don't have to buy them from a company like Levinson either.

Companies like Arcam have been making very good CD players with excellent DACs for years (and not too expensive). A quick A/B comparison will show that their DACs, along with the implementation of them are better than a mass-market receiver's.

Even copmletely inexperienced folks who don't initially hear a difference can be told what to listen for and recognize a difference quickly.

DrXym · 08-15-2008, 05:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CraigW

Toshiba's engine is much different from a basic upscaler. It will sample groups of frames to interpolate a higher resolution frames during playback. The problem is interpolating is not always accurate especially with dynamic input. That's the reason this will probably require time for rendering and in the end is it worth it considering all the major studios are releasing true HD content on BD.

Toshiba haven't really gone into detail on how it's done, but I expect its much like the existing VideoEnhancer tool:

http://www.thedeemon.com/VideoEnhancer/

In other words it consists of interpolation followed by motion comparison to prior frames to determine static / slow-moving areas that extra detail can be inferred from.

That means it probably holds onto 5 or 6 HD frames, plus an output buffer and each cycle see it do something like this.

1. Discard oldest frame (it would probably round robin through an array of buffers)
2. Upscale new frame using interpolation
3. Compare new frame to prior frame for motion estimation
4. Use motion estimation (and estimation from previous cycle and estimation from previous cycle etc.) to do a weighted merge to create output frame
5. Send output to screen
6. Repeat

All of this would likely be pipelined so one SPU is busy upscaling / interpolating while another is analysing the two frames behind it and so on. How the motion estimation and weighting is done is beyond me but I expect it works much like motion vectors do in MPEG-2. I've assumed above that motion estimation is done after upscaling but it might happen before.

Added complication could come from dealing with progressive & interlaced data. It would be extremely memory hungry and extremely CPU intensive. But the Cell is designed for this sort of thing so I don't see why it can't be done.

What I do question is why they are sticking this in products like DVD players and laptops where it makes no sense. The Qosmio's SpursEngine apparently sucks up so much power that you can't even use it unless you have it plugged into the mains!

I also question whether there is any point at all in SUC when at best you might get some extra detail but at worst its not going to look any better from regular interpolation. It seems like a lot of effort for a marginal improvement.

If they are going to do it, I don't understand why they don't do a Blu Ray player. That's where the action is these days, not in cutthroat DVD land where a $150+ DVD player is not going to be have any impact.

It would be great as well if Spurs became part of rendering pipeline of an NVidia or ATI card. It's not just useful for rendering since it could be used for physics, hardware encoding etc.

dobyblue · 08-15-2008, 05:20 PM

The PCM1796 DAC is a very good DAC, but what's even better is the way the companies like Denon, Yamaha and Onkyo are implementing them, using multiple DAC's per channel.

I think the Denon 5308CI has 16 PCM1796 DAC's in it, which extremely improves the performance over running them in stereo mode.

ps3andlovinit · 08-15-2008, 06:16 PM

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