In an article for Home Theatre Review published in December 2019, contributor Dennis Burger argued that high quality streaming home cinema is where the action is going to be in the future for the serious hobbyist in search of the ultimate audio-visual experience.
In his most recent HTR piece, he points out that “our discussion about video streaming is incomplete until we all acknowledge that the device via which we do our streaming matters”, to preface his thoughts on NVIDIA’s new top-end £149 Shield TV Pro streaming media player.
As well as the obvious 4K UHD images and Dolby Vision, its the Shield TV Pro’s unique use of the Tegra X1+ processor for AI upscaling that really grabs him, which points to real-time upscaling in the home, especially as we move from 4K to 8K screens.
Unlike basic upscaling, which relies on different forms of interpolation to increase the pixel-count of low-resolution material to fit a higher-resolution screen, followed by some form of filtering to ameliorate artifacts, Nvidia’s A.I. Upscaling starts with a neural network that has been trained by way of a massive library of low- and high-resolution images that then looks at a low-resolution image and imagines what a high-resolution image downscaled to that resolution would look like.
In other words, it’s not looking at a configuration of, say, 1,280 by 720 pixels and using math to blow it up to 3,840 x 2,160 pixels; it’s instead taking a configuration of 1,280 by 720 pixels and using deep learning to instead predict the configuration of 3,840 by 2,160 that would look like this configuration of 1,280 by 720 pixels if it were downscaled. And when doing so, it takes into account things like which objects are in the foreground or background, and recognise eyes and hair and skin and so forth, treating each of them differently.
although he has a couple of minor quibbles, the Shield TV Pro is welcomed enthusiastically here as a big step towards streaming silencing the streaming naysayers who still swear by the UHD Blurays.