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Microsoft Edge is Getting a Video Upscaler To Make Blurry Old Videos Look Better (tomshardware.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Microsoft has unveiled Video Super Resolution (VSR) -- an "experimental" video upscaling feature for its Edge web browser that uses machine learning to increase the resolution of low-quality video. From a report: Announced on the Edge Insiders blog, Microsoft's VSR technology can "remove blocky compression artifacts" and improve text clarity for videos on platforms such as YouTube. The feature is still in testing and availability is currently restricted to half of the users running the Canary channel of Edge in Microsoft's Insider program. If you want to try it for yourself, there are a few stipulations: Microsoft VSR will only work on video resolutions of 720p or lower (provided both the height and width of the video exceeds 192 pixels), and the video itself can't be protected with digital rights management (DRM) technology like PlayReady or Widevine, which makes frames inaccessible to the browser for processing. That particular restriction could impact what content you can upscale with the feature, as most popular streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max all leverage DRM tech for copyright protection. Unlike Nvidia's RTX Super Resolution, Microsoft's Video Super Resolution feature supports both Nvidia and AMD GPUs.
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Microsoft Edge is Getting a Video Upscaler To Make Blurry Old Videos Look Better More

Microsoft Edge is Getting a Video Upscaler To Make Blurry Old Videos Look Better

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  • What is wrong with seeing old videos as they were actually produced?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)

      by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:45AM (#63346945)
      Because then we would see that Han shot first.

    • I have a current example that is relevant. Pluto recently added another Star Trek channel which is currently streaming Voyage at what looks to be 240p, maybe 360p. This would go a long way toward making it more enjoyable to watch.

      • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @12:19PM (#63347289)

        Like DS9, Voyager was shot on video tape for cost reasons so you can't get any better than the original NTSC resolution. Upsampling is the only way we can get high resolution copies.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          For anything a lot of people want to watch it makes more sense to have someone do the upscaling, clean up all the scaling artifacts, preview it, and THEN make that available.

          You'll end up with far better results than edge doing it an automatic job in real-time in the browser on the fly on everyone's computer.

          For an old youtube catvideo your sister uploaded the edge solution is a sane solution.

          For Star Trek or DS9 ... it makes way more sense to do the work once, and do a proper job of it.

          • They're not going to, they lost a bunch of money on the TNG remaster so they ditched doing the others.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by vux984 ( 928602 )

              So don't pay 'TNG remaster' prices. There's a pretty big chasm between that and 'doing it in real time in edge for free on a random PC'.

              The could hire a few talented motivated fans from the community to do 'far better than whatever edge will shit out' for a fraction what it would cost to have a hollywood restoration company remaster it one frame at a time or whatever they did to TNG.

              Hell, they could crowd source it on kickstarter; and all the backers could get a copy.

          • For anything a lot of people want to watch it makes more sense to have someone do the upscaling, clean up all the scaling artifacts, preview it, and THEN make that available.

            You'll end up with far better results than edge doing it an automatic job in real-time in the browser on the fly on everyone's computer.

            For an old youtube catvideo your sister uploaded the edge solution is a sane solution.

            For Star Trek or DS9 ... it makes way more sense to do the work once, and do a proper job of it.

            All true. However, Microsoft would have to devote significant resources to doing this for even a modest set of videos, both for the humans and for the computer resources including storage and delivery. And there might be copyright issues with modifying and distributing videos. The edge solution is a simpler economic and legal solution for Microsoft.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by vux984 ( 928602 )

              Yes, my point was that this is a poor solution for the specific case of StarTrek TOS. There are much better solutions for that specific example.

              I fully agree it makes lots of sense for a feature like this to exist in edge for lots of other cases, like old youtube videos etc.

        • Actually you are wrong. TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager were all shot on film but edited on video tape.

          https://nerdist.com/article/st... [nerdist.com]

        • Like DS9, Voyager was shot on video tape for cost reasons so you can't get any better than the original NTSC resolution.

          This is partially untrue. Voyager *was* shot on film. The miniature effects were also shot on film, just like TNG. What happened was late in the series they started including CG shots. Those CG shots were done at NTSC resolution. In order to remaster Voyager or DS9 they'd have to regenerate those shots and the last 2-3 seasons of both shows used it enough to become a serious budgetary problem.

          On a side note TNG had similar issues just nowhere near as often as Voy and DS9. The crystalline entity, for

      • The proper solution is human guided AI remastering, not fully automated half-assery.
    • Your mom.

      Sorry.

    • Some low resolution videos are the only known copies. Like an encode someone did from a VHS tape back in the 1990s. Short of finding the original tape from the studio this is what we're left with.

      Stuff like Beavis And Butthead. You can buy the series but they have none of the music video portions because of copyright bullshit, even though it was originally broadcast. The same thing happened with Daria when it was released on dvd. The show used real music because they had access to the MTV library. However o

  • This is another of those irrelevant items which keeps being piled on rather than the overpaid hacks at Microsoft fixing real world issues. If I had a dollar for every time Edge couldn't download a file or, after the file has been downloaded and closing the browser generates the, "Files are still being downloaded. Do you want to close?" message, I wouldn't have to work any more.

    This is the 21st century. How difficult is it for a browser to successfully pull down a file?

    • If I had a dollar for every time I couldn't download a file or had a download fail, I'd not have a dollar to my name, just a broke arse bitch sitting around wondering what you guys are doing so wrong when using your computer which makes you so wealthy.

      Seriously download problems? There's not even anything unique about Edge downloads. It's just Chromium and it works just fine.

    • Even more infuriating is google having millions of results for FTP listings. Neither Chrome or Firefox support the protocol anymore. I looked to see if anyone wrote a plugin but it's probably not possible. Now I have to use wget or WinSCP if I feel like browsing the site.

  • CSI (Score:3, Funny)

    by unimind ( 743130 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:34AM (#63346905)
    I'll only be impressed when they're able to enhance and zoom with high enough detail to do stuff like identify the killer in the reflection of the victim's eye, like they can in that show.
  • This could be really nice for cloud gaming. xCloud will sometimes drop resolution on me if I'm on the edges of my Wi-Fi. Getting super-sampled back up again would be great.

    • This could be really nice for cloud gaming. xCloud will sometimes drop resolution on me if I'm on the edges of my Wi-Fi. Getting super-sampled back up again would be great.

      Plug in a network cable and you won't have this problem.

      • I'd rather deal with lower resolution than drag CAT6 out to my deck. I can live with resolution drops, but this would certainly be nice if it makes that irrelevant.
    • This is what it amounts to - a more sophisticated lossy compression algorithm. The stronger the model of expected content you have, the fewer bits you need to send to get equivalent quality. In this case the stronger model is added post-hoc to video that is low bitrate simply because it is old, so the end-to-end result won't be quite as good as if the bits were dropped selectively with this reconstruction in mind. But the principle is the same and it will mostly work.
  • right? I mean, they are using the Chromium based engine and guts so it seems fair to share.

  • Enhance....Enhance....Enhance!!!

  • Next up: live censorship (Score:5, Interesting)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Monday March 06, 2023 @11:13AM (#63347039)

    Does anyone else have this weird feeling that the next step in the roadmap is to implement live censorship of old videos which have now somehow fallen into a disrepute?

  • All that GPU processing power, all that programming, and yet AI programs turn it to crap just after 2x. With video, there is often strange ringing artifacts--even worse that too much unmask sharpen.

    • I'm not sure what you're expecting but even when it's turned to crap beyond 2x it's still a fuckton better than without it attempting to scale above 2x. And some software is better than others, so you're being a bit premature commenting on something you've not had the opportunity to try. ***I say some software, but it's really some training sets are better than others. Software which provides multiple training sets show how results can vary widely.

  • Microsoft went with Chromium which will shortly be neutered of the ad blocking APIs. Since even Google pushes sketchy ads that link to malware Firefox will be in again.

  • Embrace and Extend: Zoom and Enhance

  • Rolling Release, unstable/untrusted
    Stable, just untrusted
    Previous Release, unsupported/untrusted

  • I'm wondering if this can fix some of the really old Youtube videos shot a 144p potato.

      There is content like this I want to see that I would rather have the 'Aquavision' removed.

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