Server - Server side up scaling

[Jdiesel 1114]

Not sure how popular this idea will be but I thought I'd throw it out there for comments.

 

There are a lot of playback clients out there with poor upscaling (Roku, Web client, etc) which can make watching SD content a poor experience. I know that it is typically the players job to upscale the video but sometimes the result just aren't great. What if there was the option to use the server to upscale the video server side on-the-fly before delivering it to the client? I personally like the quality of Lanczos upscaling in Kodi on my SD videos but can not do this on my Roku.

 

My thoughts on how this might work, the ability to enable a rule to upscale anything below a certain resolution to a target resolution. For example, all videos with a height <480 get upscaled to 720, all videos with a height <720 get upscaled to 1080. Or maybe it can be as simple as doubling the resolution, for example, enable the option to double the resolution of all SD content.

-vf scale=-1:720:flags=lanczos

-vf scale=-1:1080:flags=bicubic

There are obviously downsides to this such as needing transcoding, the amount of horsepower required to upscale, and increased file sizes over the original. 

 

Would anyone else use something like this?

[schmitty 61]

I think this would put too much load on the server.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Jdiesel 1114]

No need to use it if your server can't handle it.

[anderbytes 139]

I'm all about customizations... If the Emby admin allows it, Ok. If not... just don't turn the feature On.

 

Even more cool would be to configure when it will upscale (Ex: only for SD? Min width/height? Only if server is not too loaded?)