How to retain interlace with gui4ffmpeg?

[jbodin]

I have been using gui4ffmpeg to resize my mpeg captures (my Emuzed Maui III capture card only captures in full-D1 or SVCD resolutions). Gui4ffmpeg works great for this purpose and the resultant video quality is good, and the audio is always in sync, so this method works great for me (especially when converting the kids' cartoons to half-D1 resolution so I can fit more cartoons on each disk).

The one problem I have is the fact that my captures are all interlaced (top field first), and when I resize with gui4ffmpeg the resultant file is always progressive . . . and the resultant files show a lot of jitter and jerkiness during horizontal pans and during high-motion scenes. I can fix this by using ReStream to restore the interlace, but I'd like to find an easier way to do it -- like finding some way to make gui4ffmpeg retain the original interlace settings.

I've found lots of documentation on how use gui4ffmpeg to de-interlace, but no info on how to get it to retain interlacing.

Does anybody who is more familiar with gui4ffmpeg know how to do this? Or is there another encoder (free encoders only, please) that might be more suitable for retaining the interlacing?

Any assistance at all would be GREATLY appreciated.

[jbodin]

Hmmmm . . . I thought I'd searched through all the guides and threads possible, but I just discovered that you can use the "-interlace" flag in ffmpeg to retain the interlacing. Is it really this siimple? If so, I can't believe I missed it (kind of figures, though -- ask a stupid question in a public forum and THEN you find the answer on your own -- DOH!).



I'm running some test conversions now on some interlaced captures to see if this works . . . I'll report back later.

[jbodin]

Okay, back to the resident geniuses for help -- I've tried just about EVERY verison of ffmpeg I can find, and none of them seem to suppot the "-interlace" flag, so that rules THAT out.

Any other ideas?

[jbodin]

Found the solution:

-ilme force interlaced me support in encoder (MPEG2/MPEG4)

The "-ilme" switch forces interlaced motion estimation support -- using that switch, when I resize mpeg files using gui4ffmpeg, interlaced (top field first) files come out interlaced (top field first), rather than progressive.