As many probably know, I've been on the hunt for an affordable scaler solution. While in reality, I've needed it for the horrible 1080I output of my cable box, LD made getting one a higher priority.

Cheap ones were cheap, I was advised not to get a receiver as they may not give full access to chipset features.

For the last few wees I've been playing with the idea of building one with an HTPC. My current analog DV capture card doesn't work with Win7, so that 2ghz P4 laptop did it with a VGA cable, just wasn't powerful eough. However, I can attest that using VLC to pull a stream looked *really* good...at a whopping 3 fps.

So, I ordered some cheap video hardware on ebay that works with Win7 so I could prototype software and see just how much power you'd need. That was Monday night.

This morning, a Key Digital 1080p iSync scaler popped up on ebay for a steal, so I bought it. But Ill be getting the PC hardware first If , and I plan on hacking away with it after it arrives to share any findings. If I can fashion a usable scaler with a Core 2 Duo laptop and a $5 video converter, I'm sure many of you would love to hear details....or not.

well, i don't have much money either BUT:
what would the cost be to just buy something and making something??

i've seen scalers for 200-500
as others say get a DVD recorder, these are usually under 100.
so what is the cost to make something and how many hours??

if it will cost $30 bucks and 6 hours then for me it's not worth it, i pack stuff for shipping and do repairs on stuff all day long and i dont' need more work.

As far as DVD recorders, I flung a Philips and a Samsung on my rack and out the door. They only did 1080p upscaling on DVD playback. If they were doing upscaling, it didn't look like it. I realize people's milage may vary...mine was about as efficient as a Hummer. I've also got two semi-useless DVD recorders I have to get rid of.

I do realize there's a point of diminishing return on money/time investment; but hear
me out. I realize not everyone has an HTPC, or a spare PC; I don't even know how common DVI/HDMI is among us. The cost will vary depending what you want to use.

As far as time, it usually takes the person who's "designing" or doing it the first time who gets to waste all the time trying stuff. The idea is it'll take less than half an hour once *I* figure out the best way of doing it.

I realize what you're saying...some people are just DIY'ers. That's my target. If my suggestions aren't appreciated or wanted, fine, Ill keep them, and further thoughts, to myself.

i would love to hear your outcome of the final piece.
but i do DIY stuff, but as i said before "my" time may not be worth it.

but i know you can get some good PCs at pawn shops etc cheap so if it's something that you get to save on
i would be interested.
but it has to do with a lot of buts for me.
thanks in advance, and good luck with getting one done.

Well, here's the status as of now.

My EasyCap arrived today, as the place I ordered it from wasn't that far away. So I installed the drivers and started playing.

There were two options I had started with based on what I found out from attempting it on the XP laptop; a program called DScaler, which is made for this task; and VLC, which happens to do this.

The result with both of those were pretty poor. DScaler has been known to work best with devices it has native support for; it lacks support for the EasyCap. So we're left with DShow support, which it seems this thing does *something* to the video frames. They're detected as interlaced; but I'm not getting the double scan-rate I should; so DScaler can't actually deinterlace it. This is on top of the fact it can't seem to scale very well. The included pull-down modes were neat, but the jagged scaling and constant comb-like effects made me uninstall it.

Now, VLC gave me great results on the laptop, it just wasn't powerful enough to run. This Core2Duo has the juice to do it; but it STILL doesn't deinterlace. The scaling looks great, but still excessive combing. None of it's deinterlace modes seem to work.

Now, the oddity in all this has been MPlayer Classic - Home Cinema Edition. It was more than capeable of opening the capture device; but it also was the only thing that didn't give me comby video. I don't know what deinterlacing it was doing, but it was apparent it was doing it and doing an ok job of it.

None of this looked quite as good as the Sharp Aquos I watched some LaserDiscs on. I haven't yet dug in to the driver configurations to figure out if I can have the thing pump me the proper field/frame format at the proper refresh rate. I could probably avoid this and great qualitty if I bought something else besides a $5 usb video capture. However, the 20 minutes of Mission Impossible I've watched looked much more acceptable than what my TV's internal scaling can do. One thing I haven't done yet is hook the DVD player up to it so I can get a control of what it's output is vs my highest quality scaling...the blu-ray player. I still highly suspect I could get it better if I could tweak the DV output from the capture chip.

System specs (for a reference point)

Asus G72GX Laptop:

2.53ghz Intel Core2Duo P8700
Desktop-class Intel P43/45 chipset (yes, a high performance chipset designed for desktops)
6gb DDR2 SDRAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX260M w/ 1GB DDR3 ram (dedicated card; G92b core; about the same as 9800 GTX+ desktop card)

Have you tried using an internal capture card?

That would require a desktop.

My original intention was to buy the USB capture, see what I can get with my laptop, then maybe invest in a "cheap" desktop system that would allow me to get a proper PCI capture card. That was, however, until I bought a proper scaler. It's shipping cross country via UPS, and haven't gotten shipment confirmation; it might be another 10 days before it shows up. In the meantime, I've got this cheap USB thing to play around with.

I did some digging and discovered that someone had success with cheap usb capture, but with none of the software I was using. They did however mention if they did this bass-ackwards thing with virtualdub, they could set ffdshow to process raw video and it would apply a deinterlacing feature. That was a couple years, and a few versions of MPlayer ago. I also remembered that half the time, i don't get the codec pop-ups in the system tray. So there's likely a video filter in MPlayer's chain I'm not seeing doing it; and it's likely ffdshow. When I head back and play with it some more, this will be the first place I look.

Another disadvantage of VLC, is that while the capture device has it's own audio feed; it can't use it. I could capture from USB sound and play through HDMI just fine; and VLC did a decent job of actually keeping it in sync. But thus far, MPlayer has proven to be best solution for this. The 20 minute run of MI I gave it earlier looked great. Still looks a tad low on the resolution, then again, I was scaling it from letterbox up to 1080p. But MPlayer has this quirk that if you pause the video for any reason, it won't resume the audio very well. Since I've got this habit of clicking to go full-screen, I thought for a while it just crashed when going full-screen.

There's still more testing and tweaking to be done.

I've never found a good (non-commercial) video capture device for PC. It always looks terrible and never produces are good picture. I would stay away from these. Better to spend on descent scaler once, than go through those cheap $50 video capture devices and never find one that works well. IMHO.

The capture card I have, Pinnacle Studio Pro, is pretty good as you have the option to capture anything you feed it in the highest DV bitrate possible (30Mbps for video, 1.5Mbps for audio) so it does a good job with Laserdiscs (I one time captured an entire side of a disc--that 50+ minutes used 12GB of data!) It's just that, it's only good for capturing video. You can't use it for video pass through if you were thinking about using it for an HTPC.

I'd be interested in how the iSync performs.

Technically, you aren't using it as pass through. The software "captures" the video and does stuff to it, without writing data to the hard drive. I bet if you were to set it as capture device in Mplayers options, you'd get video.

But, yeah, it seems all video capture is poor. The device I have only has a 9-bit video converter. There are also no options I can tweak for video output. So, at best, I'm getting unknown deinterlacing done by mpleyer. I can't figure out what its doing exactly. I can add some sharpen filters and it looks acceptable, better than my tv by itself.

I'm also anxious to see how the iscaler does. Sadly the person on the other end is dragging their butt on getting it shipped out. As it stands, it'll be next Monday before it shows, each day adding a day. If they don't ship it this week I'm ging to send angry emails, if they don't send it within two weeks, Ill demand refund and then hand him over to eBay.

I basically exhausted options on the HTPC route. The hardware is way too inferior now. The software is limited. And $50? That "EasyCap" cost $5.