Progressive or Interlaced?

[scottrempel]

I am making vcd's for my Toshiba SD-2800 standalone DVD player and I heard that you must deinterlace for VCD. Is this true? Also, this player is supposed to be able to handle XVCD. Can XVCD handle an interlaced video. I am only watching the videos on a TV screen (not on computer) and want to know if the video should be interlaced or not.

Thanks for any help.

[adam]

Vcds use mpeg1 and mpeg1 does not support interlacing. If you simply take an interlaced source and encode to mpeg1 than you lose half of the fields so in effect, the process alone deinterlaces for you. However, if the interlacing pattern was very random, often the case with anime, then there might be some interlacing artifacts left behind, in which case a deinterlace filter would be needed to clean it up.

Also some people may prefer to blend the fields rather than discard half of them, and for this reason you may want to deinterlace using a blend filter while encoding. Generally speaking, however, blending deinterlace filters usually do not produce good results.

My first advice would be to do an IVTC or in the case of an ntsc dvd source, than simply use forced film in dvd2avi (of course only where applicable...do a forum search.) This returns the film to its original framerate of 24fps and you encode at 23.976fps (ntscfilm) which frees up %20 more bitrate, greatly increasing quality or decreasing filesize by %20 at the same quality, depending on how you encode. Not only does this remove all interlacing but its just a much more practicle and high quality way of encoding ntsc material.

However, if you do not choose to encode in regular ntsc (29.97fps) then I would recommend that you not deinterlace unless you notice interlacing during playback, which is fairly uncommon with mpeg1.

Xvcd uses mpeg1 so it does not support interlacing either. In terms of deinterlacing, treat XVCD the same as VCD.

Now if you switch to SVCD or XSVCD then you can keep your movie interlaced or deinterlace if necessary, but that's a whole other discussion.

[incognito]

Now if you switch to SVCD or XSVCD then you can keep your movie interlaced or deinterlace if necessary, but that's a whole other discussion.

ahhh... but a discussion worth having adam!

assuming that you plan on playing back on a non-progressive scan tv,
is there any benefit, visually speaking to having a progressive
svcd source?

[fingernailX]

Yes incognito there is.

When you dump that piece of crap non-progressive scan TV and get a 2000 lumen XGA projector you won't have to reencode!