x264: Interlaced movie: Change to progressive??

[samtroy]

Hi all,

I just stumbled over an interlaced encoded movie (MBAFF). I've never had one of these before. I usually reencode my movies to 1080p, 12 Mbps, Preset Slow, 2-Pass.

What is the best thing to do here: Reencode it the same way (interlaced/MBAFF) or use the --no interlaced parameter and change to progressive. Is this even possible?

Thanks for any help here.

[nevcairiel]

You would need to deinterlace the movie if you want to change to progressive, through AviSynth is probably the best way. Just removing the interlaced flags will likely cause an unpleasant viewing experience.

[samtroy]

Well, I don't use AviSynth. I feed the movies directly into the x264 encoder.

This shouldn't be a problem quality-wise, right (for normal progressive movies)? Or is the internal x264 decoder worse that AviSynth?

[detmek]

For progressive movies it is not a problem. But if you want to deinterlace a movie and encode it as progressive with maximum quality you will need Avisynth and QTGMC script.

[benwaggoner]

Also, what are you playing back on? Some devices can handle 1080i30 (Level 4.1) but not 1080p60 (Level 4.2). So keeping it interlaced may be the only way to keep the full temporal AND spatial detail of your existing file.

However, if you only want to play back on 1080p60 players, and use a really good motion adaptive deinterlacer that's meaningfully better that what the players do in real-time, the improvement could be bigger than the generation loss of reencoding.

[samtroy]

I see. Thanks alot for your help. :thanks: