incomplete deinterlacing on avatar DVD

[raido]

I just got the Avatar, The Last Airbender Season 1 DVD (the animated series, not the horrible movie). From what I read in these forums it seems that this source is a hybrid source. I tried animeivtc(mode=4) but I play the movie I keep getting what can best be described as a "flickering" on the dark lines which may be the result of incomplete deinterlacing. I've attached a small sample of what I'm talking about. In this scene you can see the dark line between the floor boards of the boat flicker when played even after I deinterlace them. I'm not sure where to proceed from here. Up until now animeivtc has worked flawlessly on all of my anime sources. It seems that this DVD has a TON of problems (haloing etc.) but for now I'd be happy if I could get it deinterlaced properly. I got slightly better results using tfm but the real solution to this problem is beyond me. Can any of you video gurus help me out with this? This particular DVD has me stumped.

source (hopefully m2v is okay)
http://www.wikiupload.com/E7QBBSRI6KVL919

EDIT:
I found that setting the motion thresholds for luma really REALLY high seems to alleviate this effect somewhat. Using...
tdeint(mode=2,order=1,field=1,mthreshl=200)

[raido]

Okay, I followed the advice on these threads...

Good Halo treatment? (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143687)
Need help deinterlacing some anime (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=141433)

This is the best that I was able to do....

Before
http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/304/before1z.jpg

After
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/3334/after1k.jpg

LoadPlugin("C:\Users\raido\Applications\MeGUI\tools\dgindex\DGDecode.dll")
DGDecode_mpeg2source("E:\Videos\compress\Avatar\VIDEO_TS\101.d2v", info=3)
LoadPlugin("C:\Users\raido\Applications\MeGUI\tools\avisynth_plugin\ColorMatrix.dll")
ColorMatrix(hints=true, threads=0)

tdeint(mode=2,order=1,field=1,mthreshl=200,type=3)
crop( 8, 0, -4, -4)
DeHalo_alpha_mt(brightstr=1.3,darkstr=0.4,rx=2.1,ry=2.1,lowsens=50,highsens=20)
yahr()
sharpaamcmod()
spline64resize(720,576) # Lanczos (Sharp)

However, there is still some haloing/ghosting and the dehaloing filters seem to blur some of the finer details and thin the dark lines. Lowering the darkstr seemed to help preserve the darker lines while still reducing the lighter colored halos. Seriously speaking, this has to be one of the worst DVD encodes I've ever seen and I encode anime regularly. I'd like to be able to totally eliminate the haloing, however, I not certain this is possible. From what I've read more dehaloing would simply reduce the detail further and I've already degraded the detail far enough for my liking. If anyone has a better dehaloing solution than what I've tried, please let me know especially if it can preserve the detail better. Thanks.

[benwaggoner]

Avatar Season 1 is one of my torture test clips. And it's not just the DVD. I had the official 15 Mbps MPEG-2 studio mezzanine file for this, and had similar problems getting it to a solid 24p without interlacing artifacts.

[raido]

Principal Video Specialist at Amazon Instant Video? Holy hell! Then I officially throw in the towel. If you can't get rid of the interlacing artifacts then I'm convinced it cannot be done. I guess I can live with the results I have above, it's not too bad. Still, I love this series and it kills me to encode it using less than perfect settings. Oh well.

[Lyris]

I'm amazed at how bad some of these official DVDs can look. Looks like a sharpening filter working on independent fields, hence halos the size of disk drives.
And a standards conversion as well I guess?

[Chainmax]

benwaggoner: if I recall correctly, this show is VFR. I understand the need to use a constant framerate on a physical medium, but wouldn't using VFR encoding for the digital version solve most of the interlacing and motion fluidity issues?