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Comment by irthomasthomas | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I watched to the break. Defence says a pinch zoomed video has pixels inserted by an algorithm and they need to understand that process before accepting a zoomed video as evidence. Prosecution says "but everyone does pinch to zoom every day. Its just like using a magnifying glass on a photo." ￣\(^o^)/￣

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All the while not understanding that projecting a video of unknown resolution onto a large screen in the courtroom could have the same effect as zooming the image.

That's not really true. Video upscaling is probably going to be linear interpolation, which is very unlikely to add meaningful artifacts, but an intelligent zoom that tries to add visually meaningful information may change the apparent content.

> Video upscaling is probably going to be linear interpolation

This is probably true of the technology that's currently in the courtroom, but not for much longer, e.g.[1]. Apple have even done research on this[2], although I can't find anything that says it's currently in use on the iPhone/iPad.

[1] https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/the-secret-behind-8k-upsca...

[2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gan

Seeing the mess my 4k "smart" TV makes of 1080p video with parallax scrolling (say a car driving between two rows of trees, filmed from the side), I think we're well past linear interpolation in consumer devices with upscaling.

Counterpoint: projecting a video onto a large screen is just well-understood optical physics whereas the iOS "video up-scaling function" is a black box.

I've never thought about using super resolution on video/image zooming but that's actually a really good idea if iOS and Android don't already do it.

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