Articles Technology Blog News Company
Watching movies with real-time super resolution
The following set of tutorials shows how to set up necessary software to watch movies upsized in real-time with Super Resolution technique.

When you take a DVDRip or HDRip its resolution is usually something like 720x400 which is about twice smaller than even resolution of a laptop screen and about 3 times smaller than resolution of full HD monitor or TV screen. Which means your video player will have to upscale the video 2-3x. However most players use very simple methods of video resizing: typically bicubic resize, sometimes even bilinear resize (one of the worst methods, it makes the picture quite blurry). There is a method for video upscaling which uses motion tracking and combines information from neighbor frames to restore more details than any intra-frame-only method can do. It's called Super Resolution (SR). Most earlier implementations were very slow, as it requires a huge amount of computations. However recently Infognition released a faster implementation of the Super Resolution video resizing technique which is able to work in real-time on modern multicore CPUs like Intel i3, i5 and i7.

There are several ways to integrate this video upscaling method in some free video players and make it turn on and off automatically based on source resolution. This will allow upsizing videos with SR when their original resolution is less than certain threshold and use just intra-frame resampling on videos with higher resolution where SR is not needed and would be too slow anyway. In the following tutorials we show how to use it in the free video player called Media Player Classic which comes in K-Lite codec pack or can be installed separately. We will also use ffdshow and AviSynth to glue everything together.

These three configurations are alternatives, you can select one that suits you best: