I recently came across this press release from ArcSoft announcing the release of an interesting plugin for their TotalMedia Theater software.
Basically the TotalMedia Theater software allows you to playback all kinds of media on your computer or output to a TV/Entertainment center…nothin’ fancy there! Lot’s of companies have something like that.
The interesting part is the plugin they have developed for that software. It’s called the ArcSoft SimHD plugin and I guess the “Sim” part refers to simulation and the “HD” part is High Definition…wow! The marketing boys went to town on that one!
Anyhoo the upshot of all that is they have created software that can raise standard definition footage to “almost” high definition quality. The ArcSoft site has some examples of what the plugin can do and I have to admit it looks pretty good although I haven’t tried it myself.
The basic software comes in at around $80.00 or so and the plugin appears to be about $20.00
The downside is that the plugin only appears to work with particular types of Nvidia graphics cards. Here’s what they say, “SimHD is ArcSoft’s in-house upscaling technology, which simply brings most standard-definition video to near high-definition quality. SimHD performs this video upscaling work by utilizing the NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture to solve complex calculations in a fraction of the time required on a CPU.”
I think translated that means that the computing for this technology is so complex and so resource hungry that you need those cards to make it work.
My interest in this is that I figured there would be products released that offered to do this sooner or later and well…here we are!
It’s interesting to note that the adoption rate for HD technology at the consumer level especially in the “do it yourself” markets like home video editing and disc or playback file creation has not been as strong compared to the jump from video tapes to DVDs.
Some have argued that the reason for this may be that the perceived jump in quality compared to the jump in price may be holding HD back.
If software makers are able to produce effective software that the consumer can use to upscale existing standard definition material then this may slow the adoption rate down even more.
Hopefully this will put some pressure on the big companies to start pulling down the prices of all the high definition products. I guess we will see.
