[MEncoder-users] Best general-purpose deinterlace

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 01:41:45PM +0200, scostas wrote:
> Hi all:
> 
> I'm working in a program to create video DVDs easily around Mencoder,
> and now want to add an option for deinterlacing. Of course, this program
> wants to be an easy-to-use program, so I only want to add a simple
> option for deinterlacing (this is, a "yes/no" option, not a multi-option
> selector). What of the multiples deinterlace algorithms supported by
> mencoder (lb, li, ci, md, df and l5) is the best in average?

li and ci are absolutely useless. They're equivalent to field=0
followed by scaling, but you're better off just using field=0 and
letting the hardware scaler do the work rather than using the slow
pseudo-deinterlacer.

lb "looks ok" as long as the content is actually interlaced and not
telecined, but it adds a lot of blur/ghosting. l5 is like a slower
crappier "improvement" of lb.

md generally does best on moving scenes but it can make stills look
a bit aliased.

fd (==lavcdeint) is a stupid algorithm that sometimes happens to look
really good but which makes "outline ghosts".

The best (and only nonshitty as far as I know) deinterlacing setup is
yadif=3,mcdeint but it's extremely cpu intensive. No hope of using it
realtime, but it works great for reencoding.

Rich