Does field-based MPEG4-AVC exist too?

[LigH]

I remember from MPEG2 that there was a difference in the encoding details between "frame-based, interlaced" and "field-based". Could it be that a similar duality exists for MPEG4-AVC too?

In the german doom9/Gleitz board, a user reported that multiplexing a 1080i video stream with mkvmerge resulted in a doubled playback time, and our current guess is that mkvmerge might have misinterpreted the "field rate" as frame rate.

http://forum.gleitz.info/showthread.php?t=42015

[RunningSkittle]

http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings#interlaced
x264 --fullhelp ;)

[LigH]

I am not interested in options only supported by the x264 encoder. I am curious about any possibly existing MPEG4-AVC video stream in Main or High Profile -- based on specifications, not (usually selective) implementations.

The user who reported this issue with mkvmerge reported the AVC stream coming out of a Blu-ray M2TS file, being demultiplexed to raw (*.h264) before multiplexing.

I doubt that most Blu-ray movies were originally encoded with x264. And furthermore, well possible that DVB broadcasters or AVCHD cams use hardware encoders which are specialized in one of many variants, and that doesn't need to be the most convenient one.

[poisondeathray]

You basically answered your own question. :) Yes it exists

[LigH]

Well, bigotti5 confirmed in the meantime too. So I believe one should prefer multiplexing AVC from a container format over from its raw form, as this lacks not only of the framerate, but also of details about the structure.