In my continued experiementation with video conversion and encoding software, I'm wondering how to go about upconverting a video file to a higher resolution in the way some HDMI/Component equipped DVD/HDDVD/BR players do to DVDs.
Obviously it's possible (the players do it), I hear that even though the results don't actually look as good as an HDDVD or BluRay source, they still look better than a normal DVD.
I do not have an upconverting DVD player. I do, however, have lots of processor horsepower that usually goes unused (Athlon64 3000, Power Mac G5 quad, and can probably sneak some time on a uni computer if I ask nice). So I'm wondering how to, say, take a regular DVD I own, rip it, run the VOB files through FFmpeg, mencoder, or another utility, and upconvert them (using whatever motion-estimation and other methods the players use to make them look better, not just blockier and fuzzier) to 720p or even 1080p.
It is the kind of thing I don't mind leaving running for quite a while, and I have plenty of disk space to play with. It's as much for practice and learning as it is for real results.
Any advice from someone experienced in video manipulation?