Question for FAQ. I know that MPEG-4 Main profile support interlaced material. But how exactly does that compare with MPEG-2 encoding of interlaced material and what exactly does "support" mean.
I have always been told that MPEG-2 is best for my DV SD resolution home videos because it handles compression best for this content and keeps the interlacing without issue. When I inquired a year ago if I could use MPEG-4 for my DV video with comparable quality results and where encoder would not try and de-interlacing, I was told it did not handle interlaced material as well as MPEG-2 encoder.
Is this true?
Currently I use ProCoder which is said to be the best for quality MPEG-2 encodes for DV material. And I do like the results. But wanted to see if I could get same quality from newer codec for same content at smaller file sizes.
Someone had mentioned in ProCoder forums:
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Procoder absolutely shines with complex interlaced footage such as DV. It has a field based encoding function specifically for this
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But on the doom9 forum I found this which seems to indicate MPEG-4 standard should support this. But whether the x264 encoder does is another question:
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For interlaced content, the H.264 standard allows two fields to be coded either jointly, i.e. frame-based coding, or separately, i.e. field-based coding [1]. The frame/field coding concept can be extended to the macroblock level called Macroblock-Adaptive Frame/Field (MBAFF) coding in H.264. The concept of macroblock frame/field coding decision was originated from MPEG2 standard. Instead of splitting up a 16x16 MB into two 16x8 blocks, super MB [2] is defined as a decision unit. Each super MB consists of two vertically adjacent MB’s. The advantage of super MB is that all 7 block sizes can be used in either frame or field coding. Macroblock-Adaptive frame/field coding provides additional gain over picture-level adaptive coding
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Other then x264 encoder, are their commercial ones that may support interlaced MPEG-4 encoding and offer similar quality to that I see in ProCoder?
If x264 does indeed support interlaced encoding with doing any destructive de-interlacing techniques first, then what are the options I need to use (i.e. width of the encoded file to be mod16, etc)?
UPDATE: new thread on this discussion
here