General advice needed, plus need progressive/interlaced chapterwise

[scharfis_brain]

I never used DVD-RB before myself, so I have some questions.

I have own the following DVD: "ABBA - The definite Collection". It contains all their commercially released video clips.
Most of them are progressive and some are truely interlaced.

The DVD-9 is almost filled and has a duration of nearly 3 hrs. So recompressimg the whole disc which is has most content progressive with interlaced encoding will noticeably degrade quality.

So my question is: Can I manually force DVD-RB to encode chaptererwise progressive or interlaced? That should give a big gain in quality.

If so, which Version of DVD-RB do I need? the free one or the Pro one?

[Boulder]

If they are in different VTS's, you can disable interlaced processing per VTS.

Otherwise, I think that editing the rebuilder.ecl file after the prepare phase is the only way to go. I'd disable interlaced processing since you've got more progressive stuff and then edit rebuilder.ecl to enable interlaced encoding for those cells that are interlaced. It's a bit of manual work but probably worth it.

[jdobbs]

DVD-RB will automatically recognize the original segments as progressive and/or interlaced and reencode them properly. Both versions (freeware and Pro) will work.

[Boulder]

But only per VTS, right? Progressive stuff is very often encoded as interlaced in the PAL world.

[jdobbs]

Forcing to progressive is on a per VTS basis. But without it DVD-RB will respect the original encoding (progressive/interlaced) settings. In NTSC you see it fairly often (hybrid sources).

[scharfis_brain]

the whole DVD is encoded as interlaced.

all music video clips are in one single VTS.

I want to encode progressive or interlaced on a per chapter base.

I know, that the DVD-spec allows dynamic changes between interlaced and progressive encoding during one VTS.

[jdobbs]

Right now DVD Rebuilder respects the flags in the MPEG stream -- so if the original cell is flagged as progressive, it will be encoded as progressive, and if it is flagged as interlaced, it will be encoded as interlaced. The only exception is when you force "Disable Interlaced", which was created for those PAL discs that are flagged as interlaced when they are actually progressive. But, as I mentioned, that option is designed to work at a VTS level.

So it would take a significant amount of hand massaging if you wanted to force individual cells to progressive when they are marked as interlaced. You'd have to modify the FLG file so it shows a progressive bit set, set the progressive flag in the INF file and ECL files, and also remove any "interlaced" references in the AVS file.

It would be fairly easy to do within the program... except for the fact that I'd have to write an interface that lets you select which cells/segments to force.