PAL TV - Deinterlace or Not?

[Monkeylord]

I posted this in the New & Alternative Codecs forum because I'm encoding to WMV, but in hindsight that was a mistake as I believe most people laugh at WMV... ho hum. I'll paste my problem here and hope someone can advise on my deinterlacing dilema at least.

Originally Posted by Monkeylord

I'm nearing the point in my DVD backup quest when I turn my head towards my DVD's of TV series... more specifically my old PAL TV series.

I'm in the UK, so these are all PAL shows in PAL format.

Almost all my old shows (Red Dwarf, Bottom, The Young Ones, etc) were shot on video and so the DVD's are pure interlaced. If I BOB them I get a 50fps video stream with movement on every frame.

The way I see it, I have 3 options:

1. BOB them and encode at 50fps
2. BOB then decimate (or blend) back to 25fps
3. Encode at 25fps interlaced

With option 1, the filesize ends up huge as it's essentially the same as 2 episodes in one file. With option 2 I lose half the motion, which to me looks really "off" upon playback, especially after all these years of seeing these shows with their full range of motion. Even blending the frames doesn't look right.

I was toying with the idea of option 3, but I'm using the WME command line interface, and every time I get some kind of error which closes the encoding window almost instantly.


Has anyone managed to successfully encode an interlaced WMV using the command line?

I've made sure all my settings are correct, so it can only be the input.

The command line wouldn't accept either a fragment of a VOB or a demuxed M2V.

Currently I've been processing AVI's that I've created using avisynth/Vdub and encoding to Lagarith, but they've all been from my R1 DVD's and deinterlaced. My tests with PAL last night were unsuccessful.

I understand that AVI's don't have any interlacing flags, so when I process a VOB and spit out an AVI I imagine WME doesn't recognise it as interlaced and so doesn't progress.


Can anyone advise please?

I'll provide samples and any script details I can once I get home from work.

[Ghitulescu]

What do you intend to do with them?

[Monkeylord]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

What do you intend to do with them?

Stream them to my Xbox360's.

[Motenai Yoda]

qtgmc().selecteven() is the way

[Ghitulescu]

Originally Posted by Monkeylord

Stream them to my Xbox360's.

And watching them, I assume, on a flat screen TV?

You may or you may not use deinterlacing, a bad deinterlacing remains in the video forever, while the hardware deinterlacers (in Xbox or TV or AVR etc.) might improve in the future.

I never deinterlace interlaced videos, in particular those pure interlaced (camera) ones like yours, my Bdplayer passed all tests of HQV interlaced tests.

If you have time, or a fast processor, yes, use Qtgmc as indicated.

[DJ-1]

Hi, I also am on process of converting old TV shows etc (I'm in the UK),so shows like Red Dwarf Bottom, Only FooIs n Horses, Game on, etc etc...

Im currently doing tests with QTGMC @ slower preset (afaik this uses both fields) so no motion loss and 576p .

I'm using ps3,mobile devices, xbmc etc for playback etc.


This seems to be pretty good, ?

Cheers.

[blubb444]

IMO for truly interlaced content doing a QTGMC at veryslow or placebo and then encoding as 50p/60p is the way to go. Did that to my old DV tapes and it looks better than real-time deinterlacing (Yadif2x is the best that runs realtime on my machine but it still has staircases on horizontal objects). If hard disk space isn't a concern I'd still keep the original interlaced content though because you never know if there'll be even better deinterlacing methods in the future. (I keep my DV material on the cassettes but not on the PC because at 30MBit/s it means >300GB per day and if you have several days of content your HDD will be filled very quickly)