[MEncoder-users] Encoding Pal DVD to AVI or SVCD for NTSC

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 01:03:03PM -0800, Scott W. Larson wrote:
> Rich Felker wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 05:34:22PM -0800, Scott W. Larson wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>Because the progressive formats are lower resolution,
> >>   
> >>
> >
> >That's the fault of idiots on the standards committees, not a
> >fundamental limitation. 
> >
> The Grand Alliance was really stuck with a 19.2 Mbps data rate from the 
> beginning. They could have probably given the progressive standard a few 
> more lines of resolution but they were having a difficult time getting 
> progressive video to work acceptably and were running out of time.

Exactly why they were stupid.. focusing their efforts on legacy crap
like interlacing instead of fixing the problems.

> >My point was that interlacing should never
> >have been in the HDTV standard whatsoever.
> > 
> >
> Yes, I understand that but it was interlaced from the beginning. I'm 
> grateful for that because 1080i looks utterly beautiful and I'd hate to 
> be stuck watching only 720p every day. I doubt I would have bought an 

This is nonsense. 1080i is not 1080 lines, it's two independent
pictures of 540 lines, each upscaled to the physical resolution of
your display. This is lower resolution than 720p.

If you have an advanced TV with builtin IVTC, it'll put fields
together to recover the full 1080 for telecined content, but otherwise
what you're seeing is really only 540. Some TV's might also have
advanced motion-adaptive or motion-compensating deinterlacing to get
closer to 1080 lines out of 1080i content, but I wouldn't hold my
breath...

> >No, actually interlacing increases the bandwidth requirements
> >massively.
> >
> If you know how to cram 1080p 60 fps into 19.2 Mbps with MPEG-2, dozens 
> of companies will want your help.

Use libavcodec and proper pre-filtering...

> >>and aren't as efficient and flexible.
> >
> >Nonsense. Progressive is more efficient (in terms of bitrate) and also
> >more flexible (can be framerate-resampled, spatially scaled, ...).
> >
> Which gets the HDTV consumer what exactly?

Ability to play the video on a progressive-scan display of resolution
or refresh rate different than the TV standard. Oh yeah....that's
exactly what the industry doesn't want: flexibility for the
"consumer". How convenient for them and shitty for us. Good thing I
don't use TV.

> >Again this is all because the system was designed by idiots.
> >
> Calling thousands of people idiots is easy. Creating a standard for a 
> complicated consumer product that has affected every part of a huge 
> industry is a difficult task. But it works and I thank every one of 
> those idiots for making it possible.

..........

Rich