Handbrake and MBAFF

[ron spencer]

I have some TFF interlaced videos. I have used Adobe Media Encoder in the past to encode via MBAFF and was wondering if Handbrake can do the same. I tried entering MBAFF in the advanced options area on the video tab but it does not seem to work. Are there special commands to do this? I had also tried TFF:MBAFF but the resulting video is still progressive and not MBAFF, according to MediaInfo.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

[Sharc]

In the advanced options, type
-interlace:tff

[ron spencer]

In the advanced options, type
-interlace:tff

Thanks. That caused Handbrake to stop in error. However, interlace=tff did not. No effect though. It still encoded interlaced as progressive. I also tried interlace=tff:MBAFF but that didn't do anything either.

Maybe Handbrake does not permit this?

[ron spencer]

Actually the option you need is just tff (or bff as the case may be) and it will do MBAFF.

Of note is that you need to ensure the height of the video is divisible by 4 for this to work. If it isn't then Handbrake will error out with error:

x264 [error]: height not divisible by 4 (720x478)

In this case by removing adding back the automatic crop to 720x480 it runs fine. If the tff (or bff) option is not present then this error will not happen.

Any idea why?

[ProWo]

for x264 use this:
-flags +ilme+ildct -x264opts tff=1

[Sharc]

Of note is that you need to ensure the height of the video is divisible by 4 for this to work. If it isn't then Handbrake will error out with error:

x264 [error]: height not divisible by 4 (720x478)

In this case by removing adding back the automatic crop to 720x480 it runs fine. If the tff (or bff) option is not present then this error will not happen.

Any idea why?

Because the source is interlaced and the final format is interlaced 4:2:0 (assuming YV12, AVC/x264 encoding - you didn't tell us your final distribution format though).
Cropping non-mod4 vertically would destroy the interlaced frame structure.

[ron spencer]

Of note is that you need to ensure the height of the video is divisible by 4 for this to work. If it isn't then Handbrake will error out with error:

x264 [error]: height not divisible by 4 (720x478)

In this case by removing adding back the automatic crop to 720x480 it runs fine. If the tff (or bff) option is not present then this error will not happen.

Any idea why?

Because the source is interlaced and the final format is interlaced 4:2:0 (assuming YV12, AVC/x264 encoding - you didn't tell us your final distribution format though).
Cropping non-mod4 vertically would destroy the interlaced frame structure.

Thanks!

[jagabo]

Handbrake is very bad about messing up the chroma of interlaced sources. Watch out for chroma blending if you do any type of filtering.

[Sharc]

for x264 use this:
-flags +ilme+ildct -x264opts tff=1

Good for ffmpeg, but doesn't work for Handbrake's library I think.

[ron spencer]

Handbrake is very bad about messing up the chroma of interlaced sources. Watch out for chroma blending if you do any type of filtering.

There is a chroma smooth filter now which I use. Seems to work.