Anyone tried DVDFab Enlarger AI?

[mgutt]

I own DVDFab but since I found MakeMKV I used it only rarely. But now I saw a new - maybe interesting - feature called "Enlarger AI":
https://en.dvdfab.cn/enlarger-ai.htm?trackID=headmenu

Using the Super-Resolution technology, DVDFab Enlarger AI, the world's 1st complete, deep learning capable video upscaling solution, can enlarge the video images by 300%, and in the meantime, add in great details to enhance the video quality exponentially, like from 480p (SD) to 1080p (Full HD).

They posted on youtube this demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BroAePo-Ij0

They say Enlarger AI has "trained itself with millions of videos" and it needs "Internet connection" only "for product authorization". This means the AI technology must be part of DVDFab itself. Strange, because the recent DVDFab 11 download did not really grow in size?!

Did anyone of you tried this feature?

[mgutt]

I will try to upscale "Michael Jackson - Live in Bucharest - The Dangerous Tour" as this DVD was sadly never released on Blu-Ray. I inserted the DVD and selected "Copy" and as target format "Blu-Ray". By that it automatically selects "Enlarger AI":

2019-12-09 00_25_19.jpg (57.2 KiB) Viewed 58413 times

After starting the job it displays some info regarding the process time and GPU:

2019-12-09 00_25_28.jpg (51.8 KiB) Viewed 58413 times

And now it answers my concerns regarding the download size of DVDFab. It does not contain the Enlarger AI. It will be downloaded on-the-fly after starting an upscale job:

2019-12-09 00_26_13.jpg (44.62 KiB) Viewed 58413 times

[mgutt]

After 9 minutes it shows only "first pass", "0%" and it does not use the GPU

2019-12-09 00_36_13.jpg (97.76 KiB) Viewed 58413 times

I will answer tomorrow. Maybe it has reached then "1%" ^^

[mgutt]

Ok, it stopped the job without error message

I restarted DVDFab11 and this time I tried to create an ISO first. I thought it could maybe help to use a decrypted DVD as source. And again it stopped. So it is something wrong with my setup reading DVDs. As I was to lazy to find the problem (I know why I'm using MakeMKV ^^) I tried this time DVDFab9 to create the ISO. This worked.

Then I opened DVDFab11 (x64) again. This time our source is the decrypted ISO. Crash..

Next try. This time it starts but its Fps conversion counter becomes smaller and smaller so it looks like the job is frozen:

2019-12-09 02_02_07.jpg (43.23 KiB) Viewed 58406 times

Conclusion: Does not work. Save your money.

[mgutt]

Ok, last try. This time I used the DVD of "Prep & Landing (2009)". This movie was not released on Blu-Ray, too. And its only 21 minutes long. Again I created the ISO first. This time it worked with DVDFab11. I think it failed the last time because I had "PathPlayer" not activated by default (only "if needed", hey it was DVDFab! ).

Crash...

Next try. No progress...

I give up.

2019-12-09 02_28_43.jpg (100.48 KiB) Viewed 58398 times

[did94600]

Hi,

I make a try with a low res film (tremors 2)
I don't buy the enlarger module, so it's limited to 5 minutes.

After 30 minutes, the jobs is done (for 5 minutes), so 9 hours for a 1h30 film...
The result is filthy, ugly it jerks a maximum.

I have a geforce 1070ti (ok, this is not a rtx)

But I don't buy this module for this result...

[7000ft]

Waste of money. I have 3 titant x video cards in sli and twin intel xeon processors with 48 gb of memory and windows 7 64bit ultimate.
When i rip a blu-ray with my pc it only takes 20 minutes tops.
I have a dvd of an old black and white movie. Gunga Din is the movie with carry grant. Thought i would test the enlarger ai. first attempt
it made it to 2 percent and crashed after 2 hours. contacted dvdfab and they said to upgrade dvdfab which i did again it ran for a couple of hours
and crashed. every time i sent them the log file. This last time i updated to their most current version (11.0.7.8) and it ran for over 16 hours and
produced a video that was no better than the dvd and it was not in 1080 format.
By the way Aiseesoft has software that will change and improve video quality and change format to 1080. I think i paid $27 for it.

[acpiper]

Yes, and it is utter crap. I took snips of the same scene, the top one is the "enlarged" 1080p and the bottom one was from the original 480p dvd. Look specifically at the car model in the bottom left quadrant and (this is important) the house address. IT ISN'T EVEN THE SAME ADDRESS!

[mgutt]

A friend of mine tested Topaz Video Enhance AI and it produced really good results. Give it a try. My GPU is too weak ^^

[prettyprettygood]

Maybe it upscales 1080p to 4K better? I ripped my copy of Coraline from Blu-Ray and converted it to 4K using DVDFab. It took about 18-20 hours. I put the upscaled output on my PLEX server and streamed it to my 4K TV and I thought it looked excellent.

[Woodstock]

An interesting test would be to take a UHD title that comes with a BD also. Have the program enlarge the 1080p BD source to 2160p, and compare it to the UHD. That should be the simplest conversion, as it's a straight 2:1 upscale.

[maretedkatiegrace]

Yes I have tried the full activated copy of it.
It does not work well on DVD's at all. Nor does it work with Blu Ray upscaling. I have tried everything under the sun, and am using a GEFORCE GTX 1050 ti. It gets to about 10% or so then crashed. I am trying one last experiement and have turned off all power management on my PC including editing the registry. Just in case it is my harddrive going to sleep. Yet I don't know how that is possible if their program is writing to it? My setup does about 1 frame per second, my card has 768 cuda cores and I have 4GB of graphic card RAM and 16GB of motherboard ram. Their AI seems to be a rip off. I paid a ton of money to get their quite and mainly for their AI to upscale tons of DVD's am put onto a PC as DVD folders, and what a waste of time and money. Grrrrr.

[mgutt]

It does not work well on DVD's at all.

Did you try a rip or the disc? Maybe it works with a rip.

[maretedkatiegrace]

Yes I have it working at 100%. It is Microsoft windows that is killing it. It has nothing to do with DVD FAB AI. Its your operating system creating the issues.

Here is what you must to, then it works EXTREMELY well:

First, you must stop windows from doing dumb stuff like shutting down your USB ports, shutting down hard drives, etc. Turning off "sleep mode" does not do it. For windows 10:

Here it is running. I am using a new i5 running north of 4GZ, 12GB ram, my hard drive for windows is not a HDD or a SDD, it is a Samsung 970 EVO M.2 with a read speed of 3,400 MB per sec. Really a SSD that can read write at about 500MB per sec will do fine as this program DOES NOT use a HD the same way a video editing program does. My graphics card is an NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1050 ti, so you do need a good card. Follow the specs published by DVD FAB. Their software can communicate with certain bios on graphics cards only. So it is not only about having a card with lots of CUDA cores. That is not how programming code works... So have a good card their software can talk to. It was only about $200 for the card and it runs games very well, like Battle Front star wars, or Red Dead, or Terminator Resistance all on max settings. So here is DVD FAB working to upgrade Charlie Brown christmas on DVD up to 1080p running:

DVD FAB AI running.jpg (104.25 KiB) Viewed 36449 times

Here are screen shots of the windows settings you must change:

DVD FAB AI - fix windows 1.jpg (149.61 KiB) Viewed 36449 times

DVD FAB AI - fix windows 2.jpg (82.08 KiB) Viewed 36449 times

?
this Make MKV interface will not let me upload all my screen shots. Grrr. I have a list of shots to make it easy for folks. www.makemkv.com server will only let me upload 3 pics. sorrry.

There are many settings in advanced power management, you must turn ALL OF THEM OFF that you can find. In windows 10 there are like 8-10 settings you must turn off.
Then go into NVIDIA control panel, usually down by your clock. Turn ON "USE reverse telecine".
Now VERY IMPORTANT
Go into your program used to play back videos.
Turn OFF telecine.
Turn OFF any kind of software based "enhancements". All of these are garbage and do not work other than for super low quality things like maybe a tiny web image. For a HDTV if you use any software color or sharpness of any kind it will contribute to poor color, poor edges and will also make stutter.
I have discovered that regardless of having a crazy fast PC, you MUST turn on reverse telecine ONLY ON YOUR HARDWARE graphics card, and TURN OFF TELECINE in your software for playing videos. And turn off any stuff that attempts to improve color or edges in your playback software.

I am playing Blue Rays ripped as mkv files off a drive that spins at 5,400 RPM with absolutely no stutter, and I can click foward, reverse and go to diff points in any movie instantly.

And be REMOVING those horrible, poorly done power manegement things done by windows, your DVD FAB AI will run WITHOUT choking.
If your PC chokes after like 3-4 hours of running AI, it is because your PC is shutting something off while DVD FAB AI is still running. SO it is up to you to turn off all stupid stuff microsoft did for their attempts at power management.

[OMGKittens]

I know I'm a little bit late to this party, but for what it's worth, I tried it recently with interesting results.

Hardware: I have an Nvidia RTX 3080, AMD Ryzen 9 5960x with 128gb RAM.

I took an old 30 minute TV show from DVD (480p), and it took about 3 hours to enlarge to 1080p. The enlarger AI did a pretty good job of it, I was impressed.

Then I took a 2 hour home video I did on a camera (540p, converted from VHS) from back in 1989, and enlarged that to 1080p. After 12 hours, the results were very poor on this one. A lot of artifacts and pixelation, not very watchable.

So far, it's been a bit of hit-and-miss for me, but I haven't had any crashing problems.

My computer did generate an enormous amount of heat during that time though, and hit 75C on the CPU, which is about 5 degrees higher than other intensive tasks, like transcoding with Handbrake.