Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Strange, why no scaling to 576 and 480 in G98?

Here's a feature I would like to see, and I sure wonder why it is left out...

Not everyone has Projectors or HDTV-ready displays, so the G98 choices of upscaling to 720P or 1080i is a meager list indeed. I have a Panasonic PA-30 Plasma TV with a vertical resolution of 480, but apart from SAT/Cable TV I mainly watch PAL DVDs. Plasma displays usually don't have especially good scalers. I connect to the plasma by Component, there's no DVI or HDMI.

The G98 has a built-in scaler that is reportedly decent, apart from the minimal number of choices. However, if I put in a PAL DVD in the G98, select deinterlaced output and set video standard to NTSC - the picture gets scaled from 576 to 480. The problem is that resolution isn't the only difference between PAL and NTSC, the signal unwantedely gets transcoded from PAL to NTSC.

It seems like it wouldn't be the largest SW change in history to implement what I want:

* Add two choices of output resolutions, 480p and 576p complements the existing Auto, 720p
and 1080i.
* Store these settings somewhere. I don't know if there's any unused space for a couple of variables, if not it would be a "workaround-quality" solution to have to select 480p every time it is wanted after the unit has been off.
* Add code to utilize these variables so that already existing code is either run or left out, giving possible to get a PAL movie scaled to 480p without any transcoding to NTSC being done.

The De-interlace option already does what you're asking AFAIK.

Why don't you set video standard as auto.

Then pal will come out as pal and ntsc as ntsc and will not transcode or am i missing the point.

Michael

Yeah as the others have said, you want to set teh DVD player for progressive and then set it to AUTO, that way you get 480p/60 for NTSC and 576p/50 for PAL, that way there is no framerate conversion going on.
NTSC will be razor sharp and Pal will look pretty good too as the Panasonics do a very good job off down scaling.

Well, the Panasonics do a decent job of downscaling - but I think that the G98 would do that better. And I'm not alone in thinking that.

Most of you missed my point, I want to play PAL DVD's (which are 576i) on my PA-30 (which is 480p) and I want the G98 to handle the downscaling instead of the PA30. The G98 already does everything that is needed, but not without transcoding the video to NTSC - which of cours eI don't want.

But pal is 576 so you have a ntsc format only screen.

scaling down the 576 signal to 480 would be incorrect.

as you cannot do this on the G player then you only have one option and that is let the screen do it's job.

Michael

[This message has been edited by MTAT (edited 04-27-2005).]

No, scaling down 576 to 480 wouldn't be incorrect...

And it's not an "NTSC format only screen", it handles the PAL colorspace quite well but the plasma panel only has a vertical resolution of 480.

But I think I'll give up on this, Meridian Support did understand but couldn't say anything about if it would or could be implemented.

I "Think" that if you set the G98 to NTSC for all options and set the scaler to deinterlaced you will get 480p out allways and if you put in a PAL disc it will end up getting converted. Anyway I cannot check this as I do not have a PAL disc.

I do understand what you want to do as when I had a PW6 (the 480 panny panel) I used my Lumagen to scale pal to 480 but keeping the 50Hz framerate. However the image was actually better at 576p and letting the panny downscale. In fact 864 was the best I got on the pw6 with Pal and 720p with ntsc, 720p was better than 480p.

So I would not worry too much as you are probably getting a better image giving it 576p anyway.

The G98 is not a scaler as such, it does scale obviously, but it just kicks out some pretty standard sdtv, edtv and hdtv resolutions. A decent scaler must let you change every aspect including front porch, back porch and sync width so you can get it 1:1 mapped, so even if it did let you scale pal to 480 your panel scaler would still kick in without being able to adjust the other stuff anyway.

I tried one after my 598 but ended up with a 500mkII transport for redbook, and an sdi modded Philips 963sa into a Crystalio as I wasn't prepared to compromise on the picture quality and the handful of DVD-A discs I have did not outweigh staying with an M DVD player.

[This message has been edited by gIzzE (edited 04-27-2005).]

OK, thanks.

Hifiaddict: Yes, you're right, that's how it worls. But it's not just resolution that differs, and that method will actually transcode PAL to NTSC - with picture degradation.

gIzzE: OK, someone who has tried - and refuted my theory (guesswork). I thought the G98 would be better than the PA-30, I have read some reports of people using not-too-expensive external scalers with plasma TV sets and getting improvements.

I have a Panasonic PW6 and I output scaled output from my G91. It looks great.

There is a lot of stuff over at www.avforums.com about this and I think you are incorrect when you say that your panel can't display 576p natively. I'm pretty sure that this is what you'd actually want the player to output.

Whatever the technicalities I really can't see any problems with the image on my screen when outputting 576p. Can you?

Unless you panel is native 576 then how can you give the screen native with Pal, you cant.
The PW6 is 864x480 so you cannot give it native rate and bypass the internal scaler with any Meridian product.

You need a scaler that can scale to 864x480 and get all the timings right, once you get the screen pixel mapped (using a decent pattern from a DVD) it will become perfectly obvious, but there is no way to do it with a G98.
The G98 looks better outputting progressive than interlaced as it has a much better de interlacer than the panny plasma, but it can't get passed the internal panny scaler which is why you add a scaler in the first place.