TV Series.

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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SicMX
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TV Series.

Post by SicMX »

First off i gotta say i really like Handbrake. Best DVD ripper available at the moment. Subtitles, Anamorphic, AppleTV, H.264. You name it, it's got it.

The output quality is great. Even i can't often tell the difference between the DVD and the rip.

There is a however a but. Interlaced TV Series to be exact.
When switching deinterlacing on there is always stuttering. In every single video i have tried to deinterlace.

I've set the fps to 29.97 and the bitrate is not too high. The video does not turn out smooth. It's definately watchable and some might not even notice it. But i do and it bothers me to the extent that i won't rip it, yet.

The only solution i've come up with so far is to resize the video to 320x240 and not to deinterlace. Then it is smooth but very soft.

Is there any good way to rip interlaced dvds? Perhaps ripping the dvd straight to mpeg-2 and deinterlacing and exporting it in Final Cut Pro?
Or using another app?

Any suggestions will be much appreciated. I really want all the seasons of Friends on my Apple TV =)

Thx!
cbud
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Post by cbud »

I have encoded a few TV shows inside MPEG Streamclip (which is said to have a better deinterlacer) using an x264 codec and they look like crap as well. Interlaced video sucks, it will never look as good as progressive.
Cavalicious
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Re: TV Series.

Post by Cavalicious »

SicMX wrote:Is there any good way to rip interlaced dvds? Perhaps ripping the dvd straight to mpeg-2 and deinterlacing and exporting it in Final Cut Pro?
Maybe you ment TV series on DVD. As all DVDs are interlaced (480i). The problem with TV series (most older non-HD ones) is that they are transcoded to DVD just as you saw them on TV. Garbage in, Garbage out. I would suggest leave it interlaced and let AppleTV do the up-convert.
SicMX
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Post by SicMX »

I didn't know Apple TV handled interlaced material. If it does then i'll just leave it inerlaced, gotta try that today
sdm
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Post by sdm »

If you don't de-interlace, both upper and lower fields, which come from two different points in time (1/60 sec), will be merged for each frame. This leaves 'mice teeth' artifacts where motion occurs between the two points in time. To me, that is just as bad as stair stepping and stuttering that deinterlacing causes.

--sdm.
gbooker
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Re: TV Series.

Post by gbooker »

Cavalicious wrote:Maybe you ment TV series on DVD. As all DVDs are interlaced (480i). The problem with TV series (most older non-HD ones) is that they are transcoded to DVD just as you saw them on TV. Garbage in, Garbage out. I would suggest leave it interlaced and let AppleTV do the up-convert.
Actually, I have found that most of the time, it is not the fact that the DVD is 480i and it was broadcast in 480i, but rather that the original source material was in 24fps. In order to meet the NTSC standard, it must be converted to 29.97fps. This is then done by a 3:2 pulldown.

So, the real solution is not a deinterlacer, but rather something that can detect a 3:2 pulldown, and instead spit out resulting video at 23.976fps.
Cavalicious
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Re: TV Series.

Post by Cavalicious »

gbooker wrote:So, the real solution is not a deinterlacer, but rather something that can detect a 3:2 pulldown, and instead spit out resulting video at 23.976fps.
Thats exactly what I was referring to. The AppleTV has a decent 3:2 Pulldown, as do most Up-converting chips...but not all.

Personally, I don't understand the logic of the De-interlacing feature. You will always have an interlaced source from a DVD (every other line). If we are equating De-interlacing to Progressive, then it is my understanding that we want HB to do in software, what most Players accomplish in Hardware (educated guess to fill in the lines).

Now if HB (software) does it better than Hardware, then I'm all for it. If not, then all you are doing is creating a larger file than you have to. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

**EDIT I think I answered my own question once I thought about it. The fact of the matter is, not every on is outputing said file through a device that has a Pulldown/Converting feature (like a Mac hooked directly to a TV). In that case your only choice would to use De-interlacing.
gbooker
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Re: TV Series.

Post by gbooker »

Cavalicious wrote:Personally, I don't understand the logic of the De-interlacing feature. You will always have an interlaced source from a DVD (every other line). If we are equating De-interlacing to Progressive, then it is my understanding that we want HB to do in software, what most Players accomplish in Hardware (educated guess to fill in the lines).
The logic is actually quite simple. The DVD source is in 60 (close enough) fields per second, and HB output in frames per second. Now, display this on a progressive TV or monitor, and you see a "tearing" effect during sideways pans. HB's deinterlace attempts to solve this by detecting if this "tearing" is present, and if so it averages out the pixels in the even (maybe odd, haven't looked at the code in a while) lines to remove it. This causes the stuttering effect that people are seeing.

Now, if the pulldown can be detected, then HB can reconstruct the original 24 frames per second source. Then it encodes that, which not only eliminates the stuttering, but produces better quality video and actually uses less data (5/6 the framerate). Win-win, if it can be properly detected and handled.

Now, in a related thread, I saw a post which indicates that there is a flag in the MPEG stream to indicate a pulldown. If we could read that, detection becomes much easier.
SicMX
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Post by SicMX »

All my TV series DVDs are european, so 25fps. Does this change anything?
realityking
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Post by realityking »

SicMX wrote:All my TV series DVDs are european, so 25fps. Does this change anything?
This means you don't have to worry up 3:2 pulldown and other stuff like that since for PAL-DVDs PAL-Speedup is used.
Cavalicious
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Re: TV Series.

Post by Cavalicious »

gbooker wrote:The logic is actually quite simple. The DVD source is in 60 (close enough) fields per second, and HB output in frames per second. Now, display this on a progressive TV or monitor, and you see a "tearing" effect during sideways pans. HB's deinterlace attempts to solve this by detecting if this "tearing" is present, and if so it averages out the pixels in the even (maybe odd, haven't looked at the code in a while) lines to remove it. This causes the stuttering effect that people are seeing.

Now, if the pulldown can be detected, then HB can reconstruct the original 24 frames per second source. Then it encodes that, which not only eliminates the stuttering, but produces better quality video and actually uses less data (5/6 the framerate). Win-win, if it can be properly detected and handled.

Now, in a related thread, I saw a post which indicates that there is a flag in the MPEG stream to indicate a pulldown. If we could read that, detection becomes much easier.
Ok, had to get familiar with the term "de-interlacing." The fact is, its not trying to turn the Interlaced video into a Progressive image...its basically "reverse Pull-Down. " This in turns gets the 60fsps(fields per second) DVD back to its original fps (in the case of film - 24fps). For NTSC Television its 30fps.

So in essence, if one is to click on "De-Interlace", the FPS option should grey out, as it shouldn't matter anymore.

Now being that most DVD Players (and AppleTV) uses the MPEG decoder to de-interlace (reverse 3:2 Pulldown), its not an necessary, but after looking into it, its best to de-interlace at the source. This should allow for a better up-converted 720p/1080i image from AppleTV in this case.

Now, like realityking stated, if you're source is PAL, then there is nothing for you to do, since you're close enough to film quality (24fps) already.
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