how to reduce flickering ?

[logicom]

Hi, is there a way to somehow reduce flickering when playing Divx on standalone DVD player connected to CRT TV?
Does it would be better that divx is 50fps progresive or 25fps interlaced, cose I have flickering with 25fps progresive ?
Or problem is somewhere else .... ?

[jagabo]

You have two issues: 50 fields per second is inherently flickery on a CRT, and 25 frames per second is inherently jerky.

If you are creating your own material the first problem can be alleviated by avoiding sharp, high contrast, horizontal, or nearly horizontal, edges. Don't use small fonts with serifs (those little "feet" will flicker), be sure everything is antialiased, use less contrast when possible, etc. When converting material, be sure not to oversharpen along the vertical axis.

The second problem is one of jerkiness but it can look like flicker under the right circumstances. You see it mostly in bright, high contrast, medium speed, panning shots. This can be seen in movie theaters as well as on TV. Other than avoiding such material there's not much you can do.

You can take 50 field per second video (live camera footage, broadcast sports, etc) and encode it as 25i Xvid or Divx. But few players will handle this properly. You could also BOB deinterlace and store the video as 50 progressive frames per second but most set-top Divx/DVD players can not play that.

[logicom]

Thank you jabago, but you saw video slice I was talking about yesterday, and thats it. I cannot avoid it
I tryed to leesen the contrast and used inverse filter in Vdub, so I have now more black then light surfaces
and it helepd a bit. Still flickering is inevitable. But I am wondering I still have far stable picture watching the same material, from ati's s-video out. I never asked myself this, and all the divX films I watched until now
on that same equipement was a briliant experience. Its a LG DVD + CRT sony trinitron screen.
This is probably the end of my idea to watch that classes on TV.

About to conclude this, Samsung971P + ATI HD4800 rocks , regardless of formats!

[jagabo]

There are de-flicker filters you can use. But they work by blurring horizontal edges. You will get fuzzy results. Try using VirtualDub's Deinterlace (blend) function for an example.

Consider a thin horizontal black line on a white background (your sample video had many of these): On an interlaced CRT you see one field at a time. During one field the entire display is white. During the next field the display is white except for that horizontal line. So that horizontal line is flickering off and on 25 times a second. That's not fast enough for your eyes not to notice.

This animated GIF approximates how your video is displayed on an interlaced TV (much slower here though):