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rcoops
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Thanks for the answer Andy, I found the same yesterday. I have been playing with a home screen over the weekend and there is a clear looks and performance difference between 720p and 1080i/p.
The home screen I am working on right now is native 1080 and that looks a lot nicer then a scaled up 720p. I thought Aeon was beautiful till I realized that for it to be beautiful I would have to redo the whole thing in 1080p which I fear I am not (yet) skilled enough to even try.
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`Black
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You don't have to redo Aeon, it's native 1080p, all images.
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A static image interlaced is the same as the static image in progressive since the only difference is the order the lines are drawn. It'll still draw the entire image at the same place so you won't be able to tell it was drawn every other line or all at once. The only reason interlacing is less desirable in video is because when the frame moves it draws every other line before filling in the missing lines so you'll get a slight combing effect if the frame movement is large. This doesn't apply to still frames.
Also keep in mind all broadcast TV (with the exception of 720p and 480p ATSC) is and always was interlaced. The reason sports channels tend towards 720p is because their content is higher motion and that's more important to them than the higher pixel count. The reason discovery HD and the like is in 1080i is because the picture quality is more important to them than the lack of combing on fast motion.
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rcoops
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Purely from a logical point of view this is a simple to explain problem.
Using a image with 1920x1080 dimensions and 1280x720 display resolution that means that somehow the number of pixes needs to be reduced from 2073600 to 921600 that is a whopping 1152000 less pixels and thus less detail on the screen.
Regardless of how it is done which algorithms etc. are used the result is the same a lose of resolution and clarity.
Aeon might have been originally intended to run at 1080p but the skin at the moment is 720p, one can of course have XBMC simply blow up all the elements but the thing that happens then is that the image is first shrunk from 1080 to 720 after which it is blown up to 1080 again. Thus you will loose the resolution no mater if you start with a 1080p or even bigger resolution image or not.
I actually tested this by simply creating a home screen skin in a PAL folder and having XBMC display this on a very old TV (you know the fishbowl kind). The difference was very clear, when you set a 1920x1080 background image (some fanart from themoviedb) to display correctly on a PAL screen (576x720) then the image is scaled down to that size.
When you then make XBMC display that same thing on a fullHD screen the image will be the same low resolution but now stretched to fill the screen which is not a pretty sight at all...
To get the highest possible image clarity and quality the best way to do it is to create a skin that is tailored to exactly the size of the screen you are working on, with all images being exactly the right size to fit on the screen. The scaling up or down trick is not a good idea if you are looking for the maximum in resolution and image clarity.