Is it possible to upscale H.264 video resolutions?

[PatriotInvasion]

So I have a bunch of 480x320 encoded H.264 videos on my Mac (they are of Patriots and Celtics games if you were wondering).

Obviously they look ok at that size, but is there any way possible to re-encode and "upscale" them to higher resolutions? I'm guessing the answer is no, but wasn't sure if there was software out there that could "doctor" a lower res video file to appear to be a higher resolution (kind of like what an upscale DVD player can do for standard definition DVDs).

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[Mernak]

You could try to use handbrake and adjust the resolution to what you want it to be, but I doubt it would be much better than what the computer automatically upscales it as. I would personally just leave them as is.

Upscaling will always technically degrade the video quality, but it might look better to people. The main problem with the video is that your computer is very high resolution and pixels per inch, so you can see the defects much more clearly than on a TV.

 

[Mac_Max]

It'll usually look better to do upscaling in preprocessing instead of on the fly. Most decoders don't use as many advanced processing features as encoders do when upscaling.

Upscaling DVD players have a lot of DSP hardware (or at least emulated DSP routines) in place to make it look good. Basic software upscaling isn't quite that sophisticated yet.

That said, it will look a little fuzzy at the very least. One thing that can help is turning on 120hz mode or better if you're planning on playing it on a TV. Perceived visual sharpness is resolution x refresh rate (this is also the reason you loose cinematic depth of field when switching to 120hz).

 

[PatriotInvasion]

It'll usually look better to do upscaling in preprocessing instead of on the fly. Most decoders don't use as many advanced processing features as encoders do when upscaling.

Upscaling DVD players have a lot of DSP hardware (or at least emulated DSP routines) in place to make it look good. Basic software upscaling isn't quite that sophisticated yet.

That said, it will look a little fuzzy at the very least. One thing that can help is turning on 120hz mode or better if you're planning on playing it on a TV. Perceived visual sharpness is resolution x refresh rate (this is also the reason you loose cinematic depth of field when switching to 120hz).

Ok, I'm not as well versed in video editing as I should be. So basically, there's no way to take a 480x320 video file and some how make it look good at say 640x480 if I no longer have the original recording, correct?

Some of these files were transferred to my Mac from VHS tapes via the EyeTV 250 device which already degraded the standard def 640x480 resolution somewhat. I encoded the recordings as H.264 files at 480x320 to fit my iPhone perfectly, but deleted the original 640x480 files. I just wasn't sure if I could somehow recreate those higher resolution files, not that it would make much difference I suppose.