NetTV and Microsoft today announced they will demonstrate NetTV’s High-Resolution DVD and digital television at the DVD PRO Conference & Exhibition, August 16-17, at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. Well, upon further reading it turns out that it is not exactly high-resolution DVD but more DVD displayed at its full resolution.

Current TV set generations cannot display the non-interlaced pictures stored on DVD, creating interlaced half-images which practically reduces the picture’s resolution. With progressive scan displays, such as computer monitors and high end digital television sets, or TV sets with line-doublers, the pictures from a DVD can be displayed at their full non-interlaced resolution, creating a much richer and sharper image than possible on any traditional TV set.

NetTV now pull out a hardware decoder that seems to be able to display progressive images on computer monitors – a thing software DVD players have done for a long time – practically acting as line-doublers. Since computer monitors support a wide variety of resolutions and frequencies, dramatic quality increases can be achieved.

However, claiming this to be high-definition DVD is once again one of Microsoft’s little tricks of “Make Believe”, if you ask us.