VideoRedo not converting h.264 to progressive scan (stays interlaced)

[Vladimir81]

I use VideoRedo to reduce file sizes to send on Whatsapp etc, and have sometimes run into trouble with formats that Whatsapp/Android can not play.
I have just done some testing to try and track down the problem, and it seems to be that our Android phones do not like interlaced.

To confirm this I tried to open some videos that would play, and resave them with the only change being to deinterlace. I tried both the various options on the main output profile screen (Deinterlace Auto/BOB/Smart etc), and also options in the advanced screen (Video Encoding Parameters > H.264 > Interlace mode > Progressive). Every combo I tried though still came out interlaced (checked with MediaInfo).

I could not for the life of me work out how I created the earlier mp4 h.264 files that MediaInfo showed as progressive, and did play on the phones.

I tried saving a MPEG4 .mp4 as deinterlaced, and this came out as progressive. I then opened this and resaved as h.264 and I finally had a h.264 progressive file again which played correctly!

What a pity we lost the VideoRedo forum, I am sure I would have found the answer on there

Is this a bug within VideoRedo or am I missing something???

[Alwyn]

Attach one of the problematic interlaced files and we can have a look.

[hydra3333]

Workflow can depend on the source.
Nowadays I just use videoredo to QSF (gets rid of glitches, about the only s/w around that does that) into a .mp4 file (retaining interlacing) then use portable vapoursynth with DG's new cudasynth tools to open/deinterlace/lightly-denoise/sharpen (nvidia gpu compatible only) and pipe that to ffmpeg to encode into something compatible with everything, aac/h264 via the nvidia gpu's nvenc encoder.
Hardware at nearly all levels make speed acceptable and the output "good enough".
If a source has no glitches, then direct to the rest of the workflow.
Cheers.

PS if you're a GUI only person, then sorry that approach is not for you

PPS QSF gets rid of almost all glitches that kill ffmpeg dead in the water, it's a tool which works so well that it has no other equivalent.

[Vladimir81]

Not sure if I was clear enough what the point of my question was...

I don't think there is an issue with my files. It seemed to me that VideoRedo is not working correctly in that it is ignoring the option set to deinterlace. It only works when I chose to save as mpeg4.

I don't care for progressive or interlaced, I only wanted to reduce the file sizes and output in a format that would be playable on the mobile phone.
There may be a good reason for it, but I thought it seemed odd that I need to save in mpeg4 first, then resave in h.264 to get a progressive h.264.

[davexnet]

Best to convert to mp4/h.264 and set deinterlace to smart

[Vladimir81]

That's exactly what I did. I tried Auto/BOB/Weave/Smart, but MediaInfo showed them all as interlaced.

It was only when I saved them as mpeg4 first, they saved as progressive. I was then able to open this file and save as mp4 h.264, and this worked correctly.

[davexnet]

Maybe it's something peculiar to your source type (which you haven't described).
It worked for me with a typical 720x480 mpeg-2 file converted to mp4 with forced encode
("output mode", top right) to h.264

[Vladimir81]

Bingo! I was not selecting Forced Encode. I didn't actually consider that, but I did wrongly assume because I was choosing the particular format/codec in the output profile, that it would be re-encoding to the criteria of that output profile regardless.

I had wondered why my h.264 output profiles in VideoRedo had worked fine in the past (for videos to be playable on phones), but it was most probably because the source was different enough that VideoRedo was re-encoding anyway I guess?

Thanks Dave!