Deinterlacing options?

icaruscollapse · Post by **icaruscollapse** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 3:58 pm

I watch a lot of anime, and I'm planning on getting an AppleTV mid-may, and I absolutely adore this program, but I have some concerns as well.

The deinterlacing option causes the whole episode to look kind of...unfinished. I realize that the codecs (or whatever the correct word is) used for deinterlacing aren't as good as the filters you find in VLC or something.

But on the other side of the fence, NOT deinterlacing it causes it to look perfectly fine in the slow scenes, but the first one I tried encoding (FLCL) has enough action that it looks crappy in the high-action scenes. I also remember reading on this forum somewhere that AppleTV doesn't even support deinterlaced material, so it wouldn't even play?

So if this is the case, I'm wondering if there's a way anyone knows of a way to use a different filter to deinterlace the file (taken straight from the dvd, not a rip or anything) through a different program, and then take that output and put it through Handbrake after the fact? I don't really care about processing time, I'm more concerned with just finding a high-quality output (that will work on AppleTV), preferably that I can push through Handbrake for the chapter markers / subtitle options it provides, which many other programs do not.

jbrjake · Post by **jbrjake** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:10 pm

There's no easy way to do this. If you were going to apply a pre-processing filter for ivtc or deinterlacing, you'd have to decode the mpeg-2 on the dvd to raw video, filter it, then re-encode to mpeg-2 with a quality loss, then remaster as a DVD so HandBrake can read it. This will probably involve a lot of command-line tools like mencoder. It'll be a little easier in the future, when HandBrake handles all sorts of mpeg-2. Then you won't have to remaster to DVD.

But quite frankly, if I was serious about encoding anime and having it look good, I'd be using Windows tools like MeGUI, AviSynth, and YATTA.

icaruscollapse · Post by **icaruscollapse** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 8:22 pm

Now here's a good question: I know that the Apple TV has been hacked to Hell and back already. Would it be, in any way possible, to install a high-quality deinterlacing filter into the AppleTV to produce the same quality output as VLC's blending, for example?

Post by **s55** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 8:42 pm

Wrong forum to ask on...

Leo · Post by **Leo** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 5:08 pm

I also remember reading on this forum somewhere that AppleTV doesn't even support deinterlaced material, so it wouldn't even play?

That's wrong. The AppleTV should be fine playing deinterlaced video, and it should be fine playing video if it hasn't been "deinterlaced". My understanding is that it just won't play video that has been encoded as interlaced. If you just encode interlaced source video as x264, jbrjake has told me that it will just treat it as progressive; you have to tell it that it's interlaced (but that would make it incompatible with the AppleTV).

You can get an effect similar to blending by resizing the video to half the height; I have done this before when experimenting and then set the aspect ratio on playback in VLC. For viewing at the right ratio on an AppleTV, I think you'd have to somehow set the pixel aspect ratio or the size to scale it to on playback or something like that.

I have been wondering if it might be possible to get better deinterlacing if Handbrake could resize the video to half the height then back up to full height before encoding...