Its full 1080i Jari, but VLC scales it down fora screenshot for some reason.
Hmmm, so it has scaled it to one quarter.... no wonder it's so sharp, VLC is basically doing supersampling when it scales it for screenshot.
Not that it wouldn't be sharp otherwise - but it actually does get some benefit to perceived sharpness from this scaling. Especially so if the original 1080i was even a teeny weeny bit on the soft side.
Well, then I must be blind. I can see why HD is needed for games (hell, 640x480 is way too low resolution), but I don't really see how a movie could look MUCH better than the standard DVD quality.
Awwwww.
I think that you might fall into the 'lack of large enough display device', rather than just blindness.
Let's put it this way; home theater setups - with a projectors - have gotten lot more common in the past three years. And I mean something like tenfold more common. I suppose that the average screen is about... hmmm, 80 inches. Diagonal, of course. I'm feeling way too lazy to calculate how wide and high the picture actually is.
Anyway, when you put something like 720x480 or 720x540 on that screen, it doesn't look very high resolution anymore.
Don't get me wrong - it does look awesome, and the largest problem
(IMHO) is in the bad video mastering; horrible macroblocking in some titles, conversions from film to interlaced
and back again, but an increase in the resolution is most welcome. Assuming of course that they can find good enough source material for releases; a HD-movie made from a source that was soft for a DVD is not going to be any sharper for merely being HD.