What is the current state of the art of upscaling DVD-only releases?

Lemmchen@feddit.de to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 92 points –

I know this technically doesn't really qualify as !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but I figured if anybody on Lemmy would know, it's you guys.

I have some old DVDs that never got a proper Blu-ray release. With all the fuzz about and the recent advancements in AI, what is the definitive best way to upscale to 1080p in 2023?

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I do this quite frequently for a certain youtube channel, you'll want MakeMKV, Hybrid, and Topaz. If you really want to go all out and make a huge project out of it you can upscale each scene individually and stitch them back together in Premier, ain't nobody got time for that though.

Rip the disc with MakeMKV.

Then open and deinterlace the file with hybrid, I use the QTGMC filter, if you're doing film content you should use ivtc. Do any other filtering or denoising in Hybrid, the video really needs to be clean before upscaling. Then export it in a lossless file format with passthrough audio.

Load that file into Topaz and upscale it with the Proteus AI model, I use the manual setting (40,20,10,1,3,-2) with 25% original detail recovery and the grain filter on a low setting to help restore what the filtering removed. Your settings will need to be adjusted for each project. Export again in the highest quality that you can, then load that file into your favorite encoder and compress it down to whatever size/bitrate you want. Topaz's encoder doesn't have any configuration options so I use Hybrid to do the final encode.

deinterlace

I don't think I've ever seen a DVD with interlaced video. Is that really a thing?

They are all interlaced, you just won't ever see it unless you have a really really old DVD player that isn't progressive scan or rip the files directly.

Are you sure about that? I was under the impression it was the opposite and they were typically progressive scan video and were adjusted by the device for interlaced displays.

The Futurama box sets I have are interlaced and the rips look absolutely terrible if I don't remember to set the playback options right when I watch an episode.

Hybrid
QTGMC

Is there a way to simply use ffmpeg for this step (if it has been built with --enable-avisynth)? It seems like all Hybrid does is use a simple(?) AVISynth script.
Can you export the AVISynth script you use from Hybrid and post it here?

A quick search also brought up https://github.com/hclivess/videer, which seems like a simpler deinterlace tool that also uses QTGMC.