Can you see interlacing artefacts in this clip?

[VideoFanatic]

I took this Bluray to a TV shop and I could see interlacing artefacts. However a couple of people on this forum told me that they can't see any interlacing artefacts so I'm just trying to see what other people think. I'm beginning to think that some Bluray players show interlacing artefacts and some don't.

Here's a Bluray ISO so you can see what it looks like on your TV. Hopefully you have a Bluray RW disc.

[hello_hello]

I can't see any in the mpeg sample, playing it on my PC.

Give the video is interlaced, maybe it comes down to how good the player or TV is at de-interlacing?

[jagabo]

Can you see interlacing artifacts with this clip?

[VideoFanatic]

Are you asking me or the other guy? I tested it on my media player and I can't see interlacing artifacts.

My original post was asking about a video which I've already solved. It turned out it was my media player that was showing interlacing artefacts and it played fine on a DVD player.

However I've updated my 1st post with a new video where a couple of people from this forum said they can't see interlacing artefacts on it, yet I took the Bluray to a shop and they said they could.

Can anyone test this on their Bluray player?

[DB83]

Do you really think any one can tell from an 8 sec clip which is practically all a still frame and no movement from the linkman after that?

The answer has not changed from that other thread. Some people see them. Some do not. Some see them when they are not even there.

[manono]

I could see interlacing artefacts.

Stop calling it 'interlacing artifacts'. Didn't pdr already try and correct you on this? Interlacing isn't an artifact. There might be deinterlacing artifacts if it were deinterlaced (blending or jaggies/aliasing, or whatever). As DB83 mentioned, what's the point of asking about interlacing on a virtually static clip. But, to answer your question, yes, it shows interlacing, at the part where the man's arm moves as it dissolves into him. As does jagabo's clip shows interlacing. Neither, when burned to disc and played on a PS3 to a Hi-Def TV, show any interlacing. As I mentioned before I always have the deinterlacer turned off in MPC-HC.

Are you asking me or the other guy? I tested it on my media player and I can't see interlacing artifacts.

Because whatever player you use has its deinterlacer turned on.

I also burned the BD ISO to a DVD-RW but the PS3 showed 'unsupported format' for some reason. Maybe it doesn't like Blu-Rays on a DVD. It was the first time I ever tried to play a Blu-Ray and don't know much about it.

[johns0]

Ps3 doesnt like dvd-rw.It will play blu-ray and achd on dvd as long as its on dvd-/+r and single session finalized.

[manono]

Ps3 doesnt like dvd-rw.It will play blu-ray and achd on dvd as long as its on dvd-/+r and single session finalized.

Thanks a lot, johns0. That answers that question, but I'm not going to waste a DVD+R to test the video.

[jagabo]

Are you asking me or the other guy? I tested it on my media player and I can't see interlacing artifacts.

I was asking you. It's a clear cut case of interlaced MPEG 2 video. If you saw interlace artifacts with that video your player simply isn't deinterlacing. If you saw blurry lines the player is deinterlacing poorly.

This is what the video should look like when properly deinterlaced (frame cropped and slowed to 6 fields per second):


This is what a poor blend deinterlace looks like:


This what the chroma upsample bug in many DVD players and graphics cards looks like:

However I've updated my 1st post with a new video where a couple of people from this forum said they can't see interlacing artefacts on it, yet I took the Bluray to a shop and they said they could.

I don't have a blu-ray burner. But that video has so little motion, is so poorly encoded, was made from an extremely poor tape with no time base correction, who could tell?

[VideoFanatic]

I could see interlacing artefacts.

Stop calling it 'interlacing artifacts'. Didn't pdr already try and correct you on this? Interlacing isn't an artifact. There might be deinterlacing artifacts if it were deinterlaced (blending or jaggies/aliasing, or whatever). As DB83 mentioned, what's the point of asking about interlacing on a virtually static clip. But, to answer your question, yes, it shows interlacing, at the part where the man's arm moves as it dissolves into him. As does jagabo's clip shows interlacing. Neither, when burned to disc and played on a PS3 to a Hi-Def TV, show any interlacing. As I mentioned before I always have the deinterlacer turned off in MPC-HC.

The person who told me about deinterlacing artefacts I thought was talking about different kinds of artifacts (I wasn't sure if he was talking about interlacing artifacts).

I don't know why you're nitpicking when you all know what someone's talking about when they say interlacing artifacts. A Google search for "interlacing artifacts" shows Neuron2 who I'm sure you all know, talking about "interlacing artifacts" and a Wikipedia "Deinterlacing" article mentioning "interlace artifacts". I and most other people call it "interlacing" artifacts because that's what I'm seeing - interlacing. Next we'll be talking about hackers and crackers...

I see some complaints about the short clip but the interlacing artifacts were obvious when I played the clip in a TV shop even if it's just a short clip I gave you. If you can't see them them then that's OK.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who watched the clip for me.

[jagabo]

By the way, I saw no comb artifacts when I played the m2ts file. Both on my TV and computer.

[manono]

The article to which you're referring is hosted on neuron2's site, but not written by him. In any event, I do see there is some support out there for calling interlacing/combing/feathering/mice teeth as interlacing artifacts, as misguided as that might be. So I'll lay off.

My real beef is with you not being able to tell if something is interlaced or not and you thinking you have to ask in video stores and online for people to tell you if something is interlaced or not.

You want to see the interlacing in your and jagabo's clips? Just open them in VDubMod. It doesn't filter the videos the way a player migh by default..

[VideoFanatic]

I can easily tell if something is interlaced or not. However I had to sell my PS3 as I needed the money so I don't have a Bluray player to test the Bluray's I'm making. I'm making the Blurays for someone else. I changed the way I encoded the videos and wanted to see if a Bluray player would play them or not which is why I took a disc into a shop. It was there I noticed interlacing artifacts which is obviously a concern as they shouldn't be there. This was on 42" screens and expensive Bluray players. I also got that problem on my Media Player. However I made a DVD and played it on my 15" TV/DVD combo and didn't see any interlacing artifacts so I was thinking that it may be the Bluray players that are the problem.

I wish people would stop talking about checking interlacing artifacts on a PC though. Just because it plays one way on a PC doesn't mean it will play the same way on a TV. It's what the Bluray disc looks like on a TV that matters to me. I don't think anyone here has a Bluray RW disc to check it for me though.

[DB83]

The advantages of playing through a PC are simple. With the correct player you have more options than any standalone.

I think I said in yet another topic that you can not really expect someone to burn a disk just to test something for you. And even if one did if that test was not on identical equipment to those you tested on in that shop what would it prove ?

I do not know much about blu-ray but I do know that the disk you have created has all the bells and whistles of blu-ray without all the advantages of it ie format and bitrate. This one is nothing more than a dvd and a low bitrate one at that.

Maybe you should also take a dvd to that shop and play that through the same blu-ray player on that 42" screen. There are all sorts of variations to consider. The scaling qualities of the player. The qualities of the tv. You can not compare your player and your 15" tv/dvd combo with those.

But there is one final issue here. Anyone who makes disks for others, whether paid for or not, has a moral responsiblity to test. To test personally. You simply have need to have the hardware to test before release. It's fine to say that the player may not be ok but you end up losing the confidence of your customer.

[DB83]

My post-sunday-lunch thought on this which even more negates the value of forum tests especially, with the greatest respect, that most of our friends are the other side of the pond.

The 'blu-ray' is NTSC. The tested equipment is PAL (at least I suspect it is). I do not know but maybe that can also affect the ability to correctly de-interlace on a PAL tv (or both the player AND the tv have to be set up correctly for that). Did the shop make any adjustments to the player/tv ? I guess not.

[jagabo]

This was on 42" screens and expensive Bluray players.

I think I was finally able to reproduce your combing problem. My Blu-ray player can play files off network shares so I tried the M2TS file from the ISO image there. I was able to see small comb artifacts on some edges. I tried one of your other wrestling MPG videos that I still had in the network share from the last time I tested with the WDTV Live. I saw comb artifacts there too. But only on edges where there was very little motion (like you mentioned earlier, on people in the stands in the background when the camera was still). Where there was more motion (the wrestlers moving around, panning shots, etc.) there were no comb artifacts.

I think the smart deinterlacer in the Blu-ray player (it is set to output 1080p60 so it was doing the deinterlacing) is getting confused by the time base jitter and macroblocking and thinks the very small comb artifacts are detail, not combing. Or there isn't enough motion for the motion detector to make the area for deinterlacing. So it doesn't deinterlace them. The WDTV Live uses a simple bob so you don't see any comb artifacts, just the jitter. My scrolling bars test video showed no problems with the same setup.

You can sometimes see similar problems with some of the software deinterlacers. When the threshold is set too high, or the strength too low.

[VideoFanatic]

I knew it! Thanks for your help. So you can see interlacing artifacts in the Bluray clip with the man talking to the camera. Would you mind testing a DVD ISO of that same clip, ideally on a DVD player on a DVD RW disc as I would be interested to see if you can see the interlacing artifacts on a DVD player. If you don't, then I know it's the Bluray format itself that has bugs.

So is the WDTV Live a good media player then? Is this the model you're talking about?: Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player

I had the model I mentioned above and didn't like it as it had a weird tint over the picture and I didn't like it. I read the forums and found lots of people complaining about several problems the unit had and it seemed that WD wasn't listening to them. So I bought the AC Ryan PlayOn HD and found the picture was perfect. However with self-recordings I sometimes notice interlacing artefacts.

[jagabo]

The issue here is that deinterlacing can never be perfect for all sources. Different deinterlacing methods have different strengths and weaknesses. A simple bob will leave no comb artifacts but it gives only half the vertical resolution, a picture that bounces up and down, and buzzing near-horizontal edges *. Smart bobs retain all the vertical resolution when the picture is still but get confused at times, letting comb artifacts through. IVTC only works for film sources and will sometimes screw up at cadence changes.

If most of your viewing is going be poor transfers of VHS sources like these, and you can't stand seeing little comb artifacts, you may be better off with a simple bob. If you want better resolution and don't mind occasional comb artifacts a smarter deinterlace may be better.

I have the "WD TV Live (1st gen)" player.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD_TV

* In practice this isn't so bad on LCD displays because the slow switching rate of the display. It's very close to what interlaced CRTs displayed.

[VideoFanatic]

For all those methods you mentioned won't I need to convert to 60 fps to get a good picture though? As 30 fps progressive has a really poor picture quality at half the temporal resolution.

[jagabo]

"Bob" implies doubling the frame rate. Each field is converted to a frame. You can either leave it to the player or TV to deinterlace. Or do it yourself and save to a format that the intended player supports. My WDTV Live can play 60 fps h.264 MKV for example.

[lordsmurf]

when they say interlacing artifacts..

Just because other people also use an incorrect term doesn't make it any less wrong.

Interlacing is a purposeful state of video.
"Artifacts" are unintended and undesired side effects.

Yes, it does matter.