Windows media scaling/interpolation method

Question

Usually in Windows, if videos or other media is upscaled from a certain resolution to a higher resolution (e.g. "monitor size"), a bilinear filtering algorithm or similar is used, such that the upscaled material doesn't look blocky.

On my system however, the used interpolation algorithm changed from 'bilinear' to 'nearest neighbor' at some point, with the effect that upscaled videos (e.g. viewed in MPC or WMP, and also Skype video streams) and games (e.g. from PopCap) appear rather blocky. Not sure what the common factor between those is, could be DirectShow(?).

I am not aware of having changed any setting that could have affected this state, in fact I am not even aware such a setting exists. I'm guesing that some installed software must have changed something on my computer.

My computer is running Windows 7, but I had already experienced the same effect on an XP machine some while ago, where it changed back again to the more pleasing bilinear interpolation after a while, as magically as the first time. What could be wrong with this installation, and how can I change this upscaling interpolation behavior?

Answer 1

I dont think there is a universal setting on which you can configure directshow. DirectShow is an API which is used by various media players. Each player would set the configurations when creating the directshow graph. This means that each application stores its configurations in its own location.

Dig around in your media player softwares. There might be quality options somewhere. (maybe your graphics card drivers have a utility that configures it).

Answer 2

You could try installing the ffdshow codecs and tweaking the methods/etc. from the config GUI.

This would give you the added benefit of more/different codec support, of course.
Tread carefully if you tweak things, though, and do your research before changing the settings, as you can seriously mess things up.