Can Handbrake maintain interlacing

[Glidos]

Sorry, I can't really generate a log to go with this question. It's something I can't even see how to try to do.

I have some interlaced PAL 720x570i content in mpeg2 format. I'd like to compress it with Handbrake, but I'd be playing it back on a MythTv system set up with an interlaced x screen, running into a CRT PAL TV. That system gives best results with interlaced video, so I'd like to maintain the interlacing. Can Handbrake do that. Two problems I can see: the output stream would need to have a marker saying it is interlaced (I don't even know if h264 supports that), and it's no good compressing one frame at a time, the fields would need compressing separately (as mpeg2 does).

[mduell]

HB does not support interlaced encoding.

[Glidos]

Ok. Thanks for the reply

[creamyhorror]

HB does not support interlaced encoding.

Wouldn't it be possible to pass the 'interlaced' flag to x264 via an advanced commandline? Or would some other issue (like muxing) still screw it up?

[jbrjake]

I played around with that a couple years ago, don't recall having much luck making it work.

[Glidos]

How would I find out what flags are worth trying? I'd mistakenly thought that HandBrake included its own implementation of h264. Can you point me at the library it uses. Maybe I can find the flags there.

[Bantha]

Handbrake uses x264 for it's H264 encoding.

[Glidos]

Interestingly, adding "interlaced" to the list of "-x" options produces output that my MythTv system recognises as interlaced. It may have worked entirely, but I can't be sure because the source wasn't truly interlaced, in that - although the stream is marked as interlaced - the field pairs are not offset in time. It isn't uncommon for PAL DVDs and PAL DVB-T streams to be progressive frames but marked as interlaced. Some of the DVB-T streams I record are truly interlaced; when I get a chance I'll try again with one of them and report back.