Any AI Upscaling Pros on here?

[TheDreadPirate]

I was ripping Futurama DVDs a couple nights ago, and your post made me experiment a bit in Handbrake since animation should be much simpler to get non-AI upscaling to look good.  I tried some of the filters available in Handbrake, sharpen, chroma smoothing, deblocking, etc.  But the ok, but not great, results was not worth the loss in encoding speed and extra storage.  50-60fps vs 600-800FPS, 1.3GB vs 300MB.  Definitely not even close to whatever upscaling process was used for Futurama on Hulu.

I don't know about Futurama, but some streaming services are 100% receiving HD versions of shows that were never released on physical media.  One particularly annoying one for me is Monk, a show my wife and I really like, which has a DVD release, and is available in HD on streaming platforms, but which has no Bluray release, so you end up kind of stuck deciding if you want to buy the media in 480p and just live with the cruddy quality or hold out and hope that one day it gets a physical release (not likely...).  I've put shows like this at the end of my acquisition list so they have as much time as possible to get a Bluray release.

My wife and I noticed this for Archer.  The early seasons WERE available on blu-ray.  The later seasons were DVD only.  Not sure if the last two or three seasons were ever made available on any physical medium.

But my wife and I are both of the same mind and are willing to go without some of our favorite content.  Neither of us likes where things are going in regards to companies positioning all their IPs for the recurring revenue that investors demand.  Lower quality is acceptable if it means not contributing to the recurring revenue trend.