Handbrake, 1080i to 720p (60 FPS) possible?

[Darkfalz]

Hi,

I want to encode 1080i video (real video, not interlaced film) to 720p video. Handbrake only seems to let me decomb or deinterlace it to a low-motion 29.97 FPS, not preserve the real rate of 59.94 (fields) per second.

If I take a 59.94 720p MPEG-2 input, handbrake will output x264 59.94 video with "same as source" framerate. So I know it can do it. It just can't seem to allow me to deinterlace (frame double) 1080i content to 720p 59.94 FPS (ie. it should still partially decomb each frame, but produce two unique output frames per frame based by decombing each field with the opposite field from the previous and next frames).

Any help (custom deinterlace method?) or command line option that will allow?

[nm]

HandBrake uses yadif for deinterlacing and yadif has a bobbing mode that doubles the framerate by interpolating the missing lines to each field. Unfortunately HandBrake doesn't support this mode, or provide any controls for it. I haven't used the latest development versions though.

Use AviSynth or ffmpeg for filtering. With AviSynth, you can also use QTGMC, which gives much higher quality in exchange for CPU time.

[JohnAStebbins]

HandBrake's filter pipeline doesn't currently support inserting new frames (frame doubling) very well. There are some patches that hack bobbing into the current decomb filter and there is a patch that fixes the filter pipeline so frames can be more easily inserted. These are available here https://reviews.handbrake.fr/dashboard/

The patches haven't been updated lately, so I don't know if they all will apply cleanly to current svn.

None of this is going to get into the upcoming release since HandBrake is in a code freeze. But progress should be rapid in the nightly builds once we get the release out the door. So bobbing should be available soonish in the nightly builds.