OK, So I download a DVD in AVI format, its around 700-800megs, a DVDr can hold 4.7megs, so if we compress a HDmovie to say 4 times a regular DVD, say 3.2gigs, then why not do that, burn it to a DVD-r and pop it into an upconverting regular DVD player? I mean, the player is upconverting to 1080 anyway, the content will be there in the avi file. My only unknown is, can the new upconverting players decode content which has 720 lines of content. I mean, they were designed to read DVD's only and they have only 525lines of data or so.

I was thinking about this the other day, is it possible to get HDtv through a regular DVD. What if you spaned a HDDVD over like 5 regular dvd's with the same exact quailty and played it on an upconverting player, would it look HD? or would it have to be downsampled to 525lines of resolution before a regular dvd player could read it?

Has anybody ever experimented with this? Interesting if it could be done, it would elliminate the whole format war with one massive technical A-Bomb!!

Upconverting compressed video (or upconverting in general) is NOT the same as the real deal.

Just spend some time watching Blu-ray and HD DVD discs on a good output device and then try and tell me they are the same!

Lots of threads discussing this around here if you're interested.

^^ Yes, it will be the same.... if it is on a 15" TV and sit 10 ft away!

Yeah once you watch something HD you can't go back... people will use this argument until they experience it :)

1080 true HD...will ruin you forever....if you have a large flat screen and have seen true HD just like hc666 says...you cant go back.

BTW its not the movies that are worth watching in hd....its all about the live sports!

No it is about the movies, the TV shows, the live sports, the concerts, etc., etc.

It's about everything being so much better.

To answer your question you cannot feed HD (ie HD versions of: WMV, MPEG2, H.264, XVID etc) into an upscaling DVD player and get it to output HD. At least not yet. A few machines exist that can do this but I believe they are closer to mini-HTPCs than DVD players.