DVD Software Player with IVTC

[Coroner]

Hello

I did a search for IVTC in this AVI & DVD Player section and found 2 threads. One about Power DVD 5.0 was of no use and the other was a year old and had no answer.

I am desperately looking for a software DVD Player that does IVTC on the fly for my NTSC anime dvds. As BOB and Weave and auto in Powerdvd and windvd are awful. They either have combing, jittering, or blurring (bob with hardware mode off). It looks terrible. Are there any software players out there with real IVTC deinterlacing instead of BOB and Weave crap. Is there anything in development like ffdshow perhaps for dvds? (at least then I could apply the decomb filter with ffdshow at playback).

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

[Yusaku]

IVTC is a no-go (processors are not yet fast enough...). What should work, though, is frame doubling. Get some player that can smudge DShow filters into the DVD playback (MPC), put ffdshow into the graph before videorenderer and play with "deinterlacer" tab.

Oh... I haven't tried it... can't afford 2GHz+ processor in my notebook :( .

[Coroner]

Bugger

Thanks for your help. Frame doubling, well I remember using frame doubling with DScaler on my xbox output. It looked ok but now that I have true progressive output (XboxVGA adapter) I remember how bad it looked. I think I'll rip the DVDs to my HDD and IVTC them, but I gonna have to read some more as I don't want to compress them again as I'd like to keep the original MPEG2 quality.

Of I goes to read

[ThePanda]

You can use ffdshow in combination with zoomplayer to play dvd's, although I don't think that does ivtc.

[manono]

Hi-

If I'm not mistaken, the software DVD players are just flag readers, so if it isn't encoded as Progressive (and most anime isn't), then they will just deinterlace, with the problems you described.

Here's a review of the various software DVD players:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_10_1/feature-article-htpc-III-dvd-software-3-2003.html

[Coroner]

Thanks for the replies people.

Manono,

I read that article, was very interesting thanks. Although it does make me feel all depressed with the current state of dvd software players. I wish some community group would make some awesome dvd player like ffdshow is for xvid/divx/etc.

[ThePanda]

Do hardware players do ivtc?

[manono]

Hi-

Well, only Progressive Scan DVD Players do any sort of IVTC at all. And there's not much point in having one unless you have a Progressive display (HDTV, Projector, Plasma TV, etc.) And some of these displays have pretty decent IVTC capabilities themselves. Some Progressive Scan DVD players are flag readers and some are cadence readers. And some can switch back and forth, and some you can choose which to use. But the upshot is that none, not even the most expensive Progressive Scan standalone DVD players, are perfect at IVTC. If you want to educate yourself on what's involved and the capabilities of the various deinterlacing chips, then read this very long explanation:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html

And if you'd like to see comparisons of a number of DVD players, then read this:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/cgi-bin/shootout.cgi?function=search&articles=5

By the way, if you'd like to see the DVD capabilities of all the DVD/MPEG4 players using the Sigma Designs chip that they all use, then pay attention to what they say about the Bravo D1. What they say about it's IVTC/Deinterlacing capabilities applies to the Kiss players and all the others. However, the Bravo D1, and only one other DVD/MPEG4 player at the moment, has DVI out. And if your display has DVI in, then many people, myself included, think its deinterlacing deficiencies are more than made up for by the stunning picture that an all digital connection affords.

[ThePanda]

Thanks for the info. I have a Sharp PGM20X projector with DVI. I assumed computer would give the best picture since it is digital and can scale to 1024x768. But it doesn't seem to play anime that well. Most players show a lot of horizontal lines. PowerDVD looks the best for anime, but maybe a hardware player would be better. Recently I have first been ripping to high bitrate divx before watching it so I could IVTC and smart deinterlace it. All the players seem to show a lot of noise in the picture, but I guess that might have been in the source.