[MPlayer-users] Interlaced playback?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 06:05:53PM +0100, Jozsa, Karoly (MED) wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hi,
> 
> When playing a DVD with mplayer, the moving elements have horizontal spikes
> on the screen. This is because the film is interlaced (2 fields in the
> frame), but mplayer displays it progressively. The Windows PowerDVD e.g.
> recognizes this and plays it without the "spikes".

Are you sure it's actually interlaced, or is it telecined? If it's
telecined you'll only see interlacing in 2 out of ever 5 frames. If
it's truely interlaced then every frame will appear that way.

> Is there such a feature in the mplayer (I cannot find it)?

If it's telecined, use -vf filmdint or -vf pullup

If it's truely interlaced, -vf filmdint will also work in this case
but give very bad results. You'd be much better off trying one of the
following filter options:

First, the pure interpolation filters. These work by throwing away the
bottom field (odd lines of the "frame") and interpolating replacements
from the top one, so they'll lose a lot of quality:

-vf pp=ci
-vf pp-li

This next one is almost just interpolation, but it keeps some of the
information from the bottom field to give better quality. However, it
can result in the appearance of "ghosts" or blurring:

-vf pp=fd

Median deinterlacing (md) is very nice. It will keep most of the
quality during stills (however, sharp edges and peaks of gradients
will be destroyed), but it may give a slightly pixellated look during
motion:

-vf pp=md

Finally you have the blend-based deinterlacers. These keep equal
contributions from the top and bottom fields, blurring them together
to eliminate the interlaced look. You will _definitely_ see ghosts
during high motion scenes, but quality during stills will be by far
the highest with these:

-vf pp=l5
-vf pp=lb

> It may be a silly question, excuse me, I have been using linux for a week
> only.

Very good that you already found MPlayer. :))

Rich