Is there anyway at all I can convert VC-1 Interlaced to another format?

[Xandros]

Hello. I've been searching this issue for weeks but I keep coming up with the same old topics via Google, they all speak about... DirectShow Source or, Avisynth or DGTools or something like that. It is all very confusing to me.

I was using Handbrake to convert Blu ray movies for use on an Apple TV you see and that app is fairly straight forward, however then I came across this one Blu ray which is apparently encoded as VC-1 Interlaced and because FFMPEG can't currently handle VC-1 Interlaced, neither can Handbrake. that's about as much as I understand.

I can't seem to find a tool (and also a clear set of instructions to go with) on how I can convert this VC-1 Interlaced m2ts file to another format. I don't care what format I convert it to, even if I convert it to progressive instead of interlaced and leave it as VC-1 it would seem that'd be OK. Can someone perhaps give me some clear and simple instructions on how to do this and with what application(s)? I'd be very appreciative.

[Selur]

got a small sample somewhere,... ?

[Xandros]

No, but the movie is red dwarf back to earth if that makes any difference. From what I've read it seems all these High Def releases from 2Entertain are 1080i, which includes a lot of BBC stuff like Doctor Who and similar.

[Guest]

DGDecNV

[stax76]

RipBot264

[Lyle_JP]

I second neuron2's suggestion. If you have a recent Nvidia card, use DGIndexNV with Nvidia PureVideo deinterlacing enabled. That will give you a nice progressive signal that you can feed to the encoder of your choice (I recommend x264, as would most here I imagine). Your other option is to use DirectShowSource and a deinterlacer like yadif or tdeint in Avisynth. Slower, and no frame-accurate indexing, but it does work and gives good results when set up properly.

[stax76]

DGDecNV is certainly great but for a Apple user?

[Guest]

DGDecNV is certainly great but for a Apple user? He said he has an Apple TV. Why would that be relevant?

[Xandros]

Well I can't use DGDecNV then because I don't have an nvidia card. I'll try RipBot264.

[stax76]

He said he has an Apple TV. Why would that be relevant?

Apple TV + Handbrake means he uses Apple OS and don't want to buy windows software because of just one disc.

[Lyle_JP]

Apple TV + Handbrake means he uses Apple OS and don't want to buy windows software because of just one disc.

Plenty of Windows users use handbrake. But it's certainly plausible that he is a Mac user.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Xandros,

If you're running on a Mac, I think you may have to actually install a version of Windows in a virtual machine. That way you can use the DirectShow decoder that comes with Windows Media Player. Without DGDecNV, this is the only way (that I know of) to decode interlaced VC-1 without paying a LOT of money for a so-called "pro" tool.

Derek

[nm]

If you're running on a Mac, I think you may have to actually install a version of Windows in a virtual machine. That way you can use the DirectShow decoder that comes with Windows Media Player.

It's also possible to use 32-bit MPlayer or MEncoder on OS X to decode with the Microsoft VC-1 DMO codec (mplayer -vc wmvvc1dmo). However, I'm not aware of any GUI frontends that support this out of the box. H264enc (http://h264enc.sourceforge.net/) should work, but getting all the pieces (MEncoder, w32codecs and libx264) in place may require some tinkering on OS X.

For a fully hands-on route, there are basic instructions for using MPlayer with x264 on UNIX/Linux here: http://sites.google.com/site/linuxencoding/x264-encoding-guide


But apparently Xandros is using or has access to Windows since he's going to try RipBot264.

[Xandros]

To avoid further confusion I'm doing all this on Windows 7.

Anyway I tried Ripbot after installing all the various other applications and stuff it requires. Bit of a nightmare, but it worked in the end so many thanks for that suggestion.

Only problem is I think I over did the quality settings as the video hardly plays in QuickTime. I actually encoded without sound as well as I couldn't quite figure out what I was going to get with Ripbot. I figured I'd demux the audio from the original file and mux it back into the new MP4 with eac3to. I haven't done that yet, assuming it'll even work, but even without sound the video is mighty choppy and won't play hardly at all.

I intended to shove it through Handbrake anyway though to deinterlace it after the fact so maybe I'll get something optimised and watchable if I do that.

[Atak_Snajpera]

Only problem is I think I over did the quality settings as the video hardly plays in QuickTime.
Don't use CrapTime! It is the worst player I have ever seen. BTW. Did you use Apple TV profile? Did you reduce resolution to 1280x720?

[nm]

I intended to shove it through Handbrake anyway though to deinterlace it after the fact

RipBot's deinterlace option uses yadif, apparently, so the quality is about the same as what you get with HandBrake's yadif-based filter.

Alternatively you could use something more advanced available through AviSynth since yadif causes a strong oil painting effect on moving parts of the frame. TempGaussMC is much better, but also somewhat slow.

[Xandros]

Don't use CrapTime! It is the worst player I have ever seen. BTW. Did you use Apple TV profile? Did you reduce resolution to 1280x720?

Always worked OK for me. Anyway I don't "use" it as such, but the Apple TV play videos using the same software so to play the video in QT allows me to gauge how the Apple TV will react.

Also, no I didn't use the ATV profile or change the resolution. I've never used Ripbot before, it looked fairly straight forward but because it seemed like it was only going to give me stereo audio I decided to just run it through it on the highest setting, do the audio demux/mux later and then stick the file through Handbrake to get a finished product.

[Atak_Snajpera]

t seemed like it was only going to give me stereo audio
http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/5717/37557787.png

[nm]

I decided to just run it through it on the highest setting, do the audio demux/mux later and then stick the file through Handbrake to get a finished product.

Did you set x264 to encode as interlaced? Otherwise the output is broken.

[Atak_Snajpera]

Small guide for you:
1) Select AppleTV profile
2) Select audio to 5.1 320kbps
3) Reduce resolution to 960x540 (spec here (http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html))
4) Enable deinterlace TFF -> 29.97 FPS

[Xandros]

Did you set x264 to encode as interlaced? Otherwise the output is broken.

I did, yes.

I've realised now though why the file won't play properly in QT. The bitrate is over 14000...

http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/5717/37557787.png

An option for 5.1 was not there. it only offered me 2 channel options. The video in question has a 2 channel AC3 track as far as I know with the commentary on it but the actual feature is presented in 5.1 DTS.

[nm]

I've realised now though why the file won't play properly in QT. The bitrate is over 14000...

I'm pretty sure there are other reasons for the issue. QT is very picky, but bitrate shouldn't matter unless the CPU (or a core) gets saturated?

[Xandros]

Maybe. I've never played anything at that resolution at that bitrate though on this computer so it was my first theory.

Anyway, I'm done fiddling around now. Got a finished video at the end of it all. Plays fine in QT, which is nice. Handbrake's decombing did the trick nicely. Now it even has a relatively low bitrate and file size (small than some movies I've got on the Apple TV). But looks good enough. So I stuck it into iTunes and, hey prest... Oh. The video wouldn't sync to the ATV. Chucks out an error about the ATV being unable to play it. I've had this error umpteen times before when fiddling with Handbrake and Blu Ray movies and it was always the result of either the video resolution being too high, or (after I finally got that problem fixed), the bitrate being too high.

Neither is the case with this video though since iTunes reports it has having a BR of 4900 which is a lot less than some other movies I've got in there. The resolution dimensions are fine also.

Back to square one. Actually, no, considering the palaver that it took to get me to this point, I'm not even going to bother trying to retrace my steps or, making another conversion. I give up. What are the chances I won't wait very long if I decide to wait for FFMPEG project to finally get that Summer of Code 2010 goal of including VC-1 Interlaced support in the code?

[nm]

Maybe. I've never played anything at that resolution at that bitrate though on this computer so it was my first theory.

Ah yes, it's quite possible that QuickTime is too slow with a medium-bitrate, single-slice 1080i source since its threading model is probably inefficient. That's easy to check with Task Manager or Process Explorer.


Back to square one. Actually, no, considering the palaver that it took to get me to this point, I'm not even going to bother trying to retrace my steps or, making another conversion. I give up. What are the chances I won't wait very long if I decide to wait for FFMPEG project to finally get that Summer of Code 2010 goal of including VC-1 Interlaced support in the code?

AFAIK, nobody is working on that currently. It wouldn't help you much in this case either because the ultimate problem is in your encode, not in VC-1 decoding. Also, Apple TV might play your file just fine if you only got it there without using iTunes.

Post a MediaInfo printout of your failing file, so we can take a look at it.

For the next try, I would suggest testing the process with a short clip first, and try RipBot264 for the final video encoding since it doesn't make sense to encode twice when it's not at all necessary.

[Reimar]

What are the chances I won't wait very long if I decide to wait for FFMPEG project to finally get that Summer of Code 2010 goal of including VC-1 Interlaced support in the code?

Well, since nobody took that on it might be some time. But Kostya recently said he intended to work on the more common field-based interlacing.

[Xandros]

Well never mind about my failure now. I can't be bothered to go through the rigmarole again but it has certainly been educating. At least now I know how to sort out VC-1 Interlaced content. I thank you all who helped me out, or at least tried to help.

On the subject of trying again though, I watched the video on my computer just for the sake of it, and noticed something. Its a good job I didn't slave away again trying to make it work on the ATV. First of all, the video Back To Earth was originally aired on tv as three episodes, but this Blu Ray supposedly offers the three episodes "stuck together" as one full length feature called the director's cut. To me I assumed that meant the three episodes were all one cut, like a film. When I looked at the list of files in the BR's stream folder there are four obviously large video files. The largest of them all though is over an hour long and resides on the disc at 15GB. I figured that was the director's cut and the other small 4gb videos were the single episodes.

However upon watching the video, there are three sets of credits and opening titles. Sure, it is certainly all three episodes stuck together, but quite literally so. It is all three episodes, credits and titles as well, stuck together in one long video. That's a bit of a bummer... There's also about 20 minutes of nothing at the end of the video too, the screen is just white, no sound. The weird thing is though when I play the original m2ts file in Media Player, I don't get any video obviously, but I do get audio. The director's commentary is in ac3 2 channel so that plays. While he's blabbing away though I can hear the main feature's audio in the background and it quite clearly does not have the end credits music in the place the video suggests it does. In other words the audio suggests it is one long cut but the video I encoded shows it as being the three episodes merely stuck together. What is this? Some kind of Blu ray trickery at work?

[Blue_MiSfit]

Sounds like a seamless branching title. You should use eac3to to demux this, instead of just grabbing individual m2ts files :)

Also, regarding your quicktime performance issues - it's totally single threaded on Windows, thus it easily gets saturated doing CABAC on HD! :devil:

I remember hearing somewhere that it CAN do slice based multithreaded decoding, so if you're worried about quicktime compatibility, you can just add --slices 4 to your x264 command line. This may or may not improve compatibility as well - it's just a totally left field idea :)

Derel

[Lyle_JP]

Sounds like a seamless branching title. You should use eac3to to demux this, instead of just grabbing individual m2ts files :)

Or use tsmuxer to squish them all into one m2ts.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Indeed! I'd forgotten tsmuxer can take an MPLS file as input! Handy!!!

[TinTime]

A quick disclaimer. I used to own this BD but I decided I probably wasn't going to watch it again so I sold it. So what I'm about to say is from memory - I can't verify it any more. Anyway...

No, but the movie is red dwarf back to earth if that makes any difference. From what I've read it seems all these High Def releases from 2Entertain are 1080i, which includes a lot of BBC stuff like Doctor Who and similar.

This was shot at either 25p or 25i and has been converted to 30i for the BD. So if you were to go ahead with transcoding then some kind of bob / srestore combo might be worth considering.

On the subject of trying again though, I watched the video on my computer just for the sake of it, and noticed something. Its a good job I didn't slave away again trying to make it work on the ATV. First of all, the video Back To Earth was originally aired on tv as three episodes, but this Blu Ray supposedly offers the three episodes "stuck together" as one full length feature called the director's cut. To me I assumed that meant the three episodes were all one cut, like a film. When I looked at the list of files in the BR's stream folder there are four obviously large video files. The largest of them all though is over an hour long and resides on the disc at 15GB. I figured that was the director's cut and the other small 4gb videos were the single episodes.

However upon watching the video, there are three sets of credits and opening titles. Sure, it is certainly all three episodes stuck together, but quite literally so. It is all three episodes, credits and titles as well, stuck together in one long video. That's a bit of a bummer... There's also about 20 minutes of nothing at the end of the video too, the screen is just white, no sound. The weird thing is though when I play the original m2ts file in Media Player, I don't get any video obviously, but I do get audio. The director's commentary is in ac3 2 channel so that plays. While he's blabbing away though I can hear the main feature's audio in the background and it quite clearly does not have the end credits music in the place the video suggests it does. In other words the audio suggests it is one long cut but the video I encoded shows it as being the three episodes merely stuck together. What is this? Some kind of Blu ray trickery at work?

The director's cut isn't just the three episodes bolted together (although I think there was a "play all" playlist that did this). The stand alone episodes and the director's cut were all separate. There wasn't any seamless branching or anything like that.

However, to repeat my disclaimer - I could be wrong :)

Regardless, Blue_MiSfit's advice still stands. It's worth going off the playlists rather than the individual M2TS files.

[nm]

This was shot at either 25p or 25i and has been converted to 30i for the BD. So if you were to go ahead with transcoding then some kind of bob / srestore combo might be worth considering.

Ouch, then Xandros would definitely need AviSynth to get clean, watchable video out. After srestore it should be much better than the messed-up BD source.

[Xandros]

Ah, in that case then I know why the video wouldn't sync to the ATV. If it is 30fps, Apple lists the thing as only accepting video at resolutions of 960 by 540 pixels at that speed so the fact I encoded it at 720p is more than likely the reason it failed.

I ran it through ripbot anyway and got a video I can work with now in any case, then I figured maybe if I just run it through Handbrake like I did last time, converted it to 24fps and deinterlaced it and the resulting video is... Acceptable. I don't think it has been entirely deinterlaced and the video is a tiny bit jerky in some motion areas but it hardly noticeable so I've decided that "it'll do".

Anyway, huzzah, thanks for all the help.

[CVideoNut]

Your correct, many BBC shows are VC1 interlaced with LPCM sound. I tried for weeks to find a way to convert output to AVCHD. I finally purchased TotalMedia Extreme 2 which comes
with Arcsoft Studio. Studio will convert the VC1 to AVCHD with settings for highest quality. I then transcode the results
with multiAVCHD or AVCHDCoder which renders excellent output.

[Blue_MiSfit]

If you're going to buy anything, buy DGDecNV ($15) and a cheap nVidia GPU ($50 for a GT210)! That way you can decode straight from the m2ts into AviSynth, all in hardware with almost no CPU usage. Oh, you also get hardware deinterlacing for free, which isn't half bad at all

Derek

[ramicio]

Encoding a 1080i source to a framerate that's half of it's field frequency yields bad results IMO. The motion looks strobey because there is not much motion blur, because everything is capture at 60 fps vs. 30 fps. If it is just a 30 fps video made to 60 hz, then it will be fine. Motion looks so awesome on high framerate stuff vs. a movie framerate.

[nm]

Encoding a 1080i source to a framerate that's half of it's field frequency yields bad results IMO. The motion looks strobey because there is not much motion blur, because everything is capture at 60 fps vs. 30 fps.

It's even worse in this case, since the source is 50i (or perhaps 25p), field-blended to 60i. Converting that to 30p will surely make the result unwatchable. Srestore should be able to recover the original video though.

[Inspector.Gadget]

Your correct, many BBC shows are VC1 interlaced with LPCM sound. I tried for weeks to find a way to convert output to AVCHD. I finally purchased TotalMedia Extreme 2 which comes
with Arcsoft Studio. Studio will convert the VC1 to AVCHD with settings for highest quality. I then transcode the results
with multiAVCHD or AVCHDCoder which renders excellent output.

Re-encoding twice is suboptimal :rolleyes:

[CVideoNut]

I agree it's less than ideal, but show me a transcoder that can deal with VC1 interlaced!

[Guest]

I agree it's less than ideal, but show me a transcoder that can deal with VC1 interlaced! DGDecNV.

[Atak_Snajpera]

I agree it's less than ideal, but show me a transcoder that can deal with VC1 interlaced!
If you have Vista or 7 then you have already vc-1 decoder installed. Just load your file in Ripbot264 and you are ready to go. However If you still use ancient XP then you must install manually Windows Media Player 11 (contains VC-1 decoder). Problem solved without paying for anything.

[STaRGaZeR]

WMVideo Decoder DMO + DirectShowSource + Avisynth + your encoder of choice that supports Avisynth input (x264). Easy, free and unmatched quality ;)

[Gser]

WMVideo Decoder DMO + DDS2 + Avisynth + your encoder of choice that supports Avisynth input (x264). Easy, free and unmatched quality ;)

Correctiooon.

[STaRGaZeR]

Correctiooon.

Haali has some issues with VC1 tracks in .m2ts files, frame accuracy is not needed when converting entire files and the original DSS works fine, so not really needed. But whatever, DSS2 will probably work in this case too.

[CVideoNut]

I did not think ffdshow could work with VC1 interlaced, I was wrong. Thanks for the RipBot264 suggestion! It worked very well.

[Atak_Snajpera]

I did not think ffdshow could work with VC1 interlaced, I was wrong.
libavcodec in ffdshow does not support interlaced vc-1. However if you switch to wmv9 decoder in vc-1 section then everything is ok because microsoft's decoder will be used instead.