His DVD player is merely a progressive scan (non-HDMI) player. When I owned the TV I wanted to use the HDMI from my Denon DVD 1920 which would output 720p/1080i over HDMI. It took me a long time to figure it out but 720p during a paused scene on my Avia II calibration disc looked much better than 1080i.
If it was a native 720p TV, then I can see that looking better! That way, the video doesn't have to scale more times than necessary (ie 480 to 1080 to 720). Just 480 directly to 720. In fact, even if it was a 768p TV, it's the same thing: just do it once, by leaving it as 480 in this case.
The real question is if the TV can scale 480 to 720 better than the player. Probably not, depending, cuz Denon has always made decent video players it seems.
It's when you have a 768p TV, AND you're using bluray, that you want to feed 1080 instead of 720. Otherwise, you're scaling one more time than necessary. (Just go 1080 directly to 768, rather than 1080 to 720 and back up to 768, which is something like a bit over 100k pixels or sumthin'.)
I think my Denon did a better job with DVD's than my Panasonic BD60 does but due to a lack of HDMI inputs on my TV I will likely never do a real comparison ... well, probably not. If you can find a hack for the Denon DVD 1920 I might do something with that. I'm itching to get the Denon back in my system for MCM but am kind of out of room for now.
It appears it doesn't exist. It looks like there is one for region-free though.