[FFmpeg-user] When to determine frames are progressive or interlaced ?

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Christian Ebert <blacktrash <at> gmx.net> writes:

> >>> I suspect (and it is what James writes above) that mediainfo 
> >>> only tells you if the video was encoded using an encoder 
> >>> setting "interlaced" or not. It does not tell anything about 
> >>> the actual content.
> 
> Right. mediainfo only inspects metadata, I guess.

"metadata" is not right word imo.
When you encode mpeg2video, you have to decide if you want to 
encode "progressive" or "interlaced" - this has not necessarily 
anything to do with the content, but with the used algorithms.
Using the right algorithm increases encoding efficiency, using 
"interlaced" when encoding progressive material (this is what 
all television providers do afaict) is not very expensive, 
encoding interlaced input without specifying it to the encoder 
can be expensive but is of course possible without visible 
quality loss using a small enough quantiser.

[...]

> There are still some cases where mediainfo output comes in 
> handy, but on the whole it's probably less precise than 
> ffprobe or ffmpeg.

In this specific case, it does something else and 
I am quite sure it correcly reports the encoding method.
(It simply cannot analyse the actual content)

Carl Eugen