Does DVD Player upconvert standard DVD's like new set-top HDMI DVD players?

The DVD drive built into Apple computers does not upscale DVDs when you play them. Because of the difference between displaying images on a computer screen and on a TV screen, I don't think the difference made by upscaling would be noticeable.

You will always get better playback on a TV screen with a dedicated DVD player in my opinion.

I use a PS3 for my DVD playback, and whilst I normally leave the upscaling options on "Full", for some older or poorly transferred DVD's, its sometimes better to turn it down, otherwise mistakes are amplified.

I've been doing some reading into this. There are a couple of threads asking this question (one on this site and a couple on others), but nobody who really has an answer. Some people say DVD Player does upscale, others say it doesn't, and most say that there is no such thing as upscaling, which is simply untrue. What I haven't seen is any information on the subject from someone who actually would know.

My own guess is that DVD Player does not upscale. If it did Apple would mention it somewhere, because that would be a cool feature. I would love to see this answered by someone who can do better than guess, though.

DVD Player doesn't "upconvert" or "upscale" or anything. When you insert a DVD it defaults to its native size, 720x480 (also known as 480p with progressive scan) for a widescreen DVD. When you switch to Full Screen mode (because no one has their monitor's resolution set that low), the operating system takes that image and "zooms" it, or enlarges it to the monitor's native resolution. It uses some form of DSP, most likely interpolation to enlarge the image.

DVD player doesn't do it, OSX does.

Call it zoom, upconvert, upscale, whatever you want its all essentially the same thing. The only difference is the zooming algorithm used. So which do you think has better "upconverting" capabilities, a settop box or your Mac?

I have an Xbox 360 connected to my 720p TV via a VGA cable, and the Xbox 360 does a **** of a lot more than just zoom in on a 480i image. It effectively doubles the resolution of the image by inserting lines in-between each standard 480 line -- this is called upconverting. It substantially increases the image quality and if you can't notice it you're bllnd. My guess is if you don't see a difference, you haven't connected it properly (you have to use VGA or HDMI, component doesn't work).

As far as the question at hand, the Apple DVD Player doesn't seem to upconvert DVDs, because the quality doesn't look good enough to me. It does look like a 480i image, zoomed in. Why can't they fix this?