Permanent upconversion in software

[CelticWhisper]

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?

[ragemelayer]

Hey sounds cool with what you are looking for. I am in the general ballpark of looking for something similar, meaning I have a bunch of DVD's ripped to my laptop but its rez is too high for the DVD's to look good. So if you could, let me know what you find.

Space and processor are also not a big deal with me either.