When would you deinterlace?

[Leolo]

Hello people,

I'm going to encode a lot of clips in mpeg4, and I'm really in doubt, so I'd greatly appreciate your opinions about this issue.

All of my clips come from Satellite-TV channels, and they are broadcasted in MPEG2 interlaced format.

I thought of using XviD, as it's the only mpeg4 encoder which supports interlaced frames. But I'm still not sure because it's very probable that I will have to watch the clips in my computer, and not in my TV. So I was tempted to deinterlace them before encoding.

However, I'm also tempted to leave them interlaced because I thought that leaving the clips intact is somewhat more "future-proof". Maybe sometime in the future there will be a great deinterlacer, and the power of future CPUs will be enough to deinterlace my clips in real time and with better quality than today's solutions.

So, I'm a bit confused, and I'd like to hear your opinions.
When would you deinterlace: right now prior to encoding, or tomorrow in real time?

Thanks a lot.
Best regards.

[Hybrid]

The future will always bring better things...in all rights you should never do anything because something better is just around the corner. Deinterlacing isnt on the brink of anything crazy in the means of revolutionary leaps so waiting is like saying I dont want to buy a P4 because in the future they will make chips that make the 3 gig P4 look like a 486...

I try not to deinterlace at all. Its ruins so much of the picture compared to the original. Look into resizing as some are better then others. The default virtualdub resizing plugin can remove interlacing in a movie while other, like Avisynth will pump out interlaced video. I use Vdub resizing now only to avoid problems like these, with slight interlace problems...but if that doesnt work...try running a few sharpening filters along side your deinterlace filters...

[wotef]

where do i start? the bottom half of the above post is so nonsensical it's not funny

- if you want 100% future-proofing, if you want to "archive" --> encoding to a lossy codec is not the way to go

- if you want the best quality:compression ratio for any video you want to watch on a pc monitor in the near future --> deinterlace it

- if you want to deinterlace --> you got to go do some quality comparisons yourself between avisynth filters like decomb, greedyhma or tomsmocomp, and virtualdub filters like deinterlace smooth, smart deinterlace and the internal deinterlace blend

[MfA]

If you do deinterlacing during decoding you can deinterlace 1 field to 1 frame, if deinterlacing is done before encoding and you tried that you should get a much bigger file than encoding the interlaced version (it's twice the pixels).

[Hybrid]

Originally posted by wotef
where do i start? the bottom half of the above post is so nonsensical it's not funny

Your an idiot. Do some tests before you start hacking my post. The statement made comes from experience...damn.