Review my steps 5.1 ac3 muxed to deinterlanced m2v

[jshimota01]

Hi all. I'd like to describe what I did and ask if anyone has comments on ways to improve the result if possible.

I own a Robbie Williams Live at Knebworth DVD. I wanted a standalone mpg of the opening song, wanted it deinterlaced as well as possible and I wanted that mpg to have just the ac3 5.1 and the deinterlaced video.

First I Dvddecrypted the whole disk to a local drive.
Next I used VDub to open the first vob, set my start and end points, selected 'Stream 2' on the audio for the 5.1 and used 'Save Wave' to save the clip.

Next, I turned Audio off, selected the Deinterlace Filter - set it to Keep bottom field with Interpolate using ELA (that seemed to give the best overall visual result for me) and then Saved the AVI to Uncompressed.

I opened Tmpenc (I am a proud owner) and setup a compression using generic NTSC 29.97 progressive settings, high quality with System Video only output. This gave me a nice m2v file.

I renamed the wav to ac3 and ran ac3fix. (bizarre how important this is).

I ran MediaInfo to verify that I had the 5.1 ac3 file - all good.

I used ImageoMPEG Muxer and created an mpg file.

So, it plays well, sounds great - my mixdown on audio for headphones has no problems, the video looks 10x better than the original interlaced video, and I'm very happy.

If your looking for a question - I guess it would be - would you have done something different to get a better Video result? I wish the original video was non-interlaced, but we do what we have to right? I just wish the quality of the deinterlace was better I guess. I tried using avisynth and serving it to Vdub to use the Gunnar Thalin "Deinterlace Smooth" filter, but my results were strange (video size doubled height), and ultimately not noticably better. Looking forward to your comments.
Shu

[manono]

Welcome to the forum,

Since this is pretty much an AviSynth site, most of us would do about everything differently.

First, on most concert DVDs each song is its own chapter. So, you could probably have used DVD Decrypter set up for IFO Mode and gotten the chapter you wanted, without the extra work of decrypting the entire DVD and then isolating the chapter from that. Or, with the entire DVD on the hard drive you could have used PGCDemux to get either AC3/M2V, or a VOB of that particular song. With a VOB, then running it through VOB2MPEG would have gotten you your MPG without further ado. All that silliness of using VDub to get a WAV file of the audio and all the rest was totally unnecessary.

Second, TV sets either deinterlace or play the fields and the interlacing wouldn't be visible, so I'd say deinterlacing it is unnecessary. Do you see interlacing when playing the source DVD using your standalone DVD player outputting to your TV set? However, to be sure, a small sample of the source would be required. And even if it does need deinterlacing for some reason, AviSynth has way better deinterlacers than the way you did it.