[MEncoder-users] Encoding to DVD: to deinterlace or not?

[James Hastings-Trew]

Rich Felker wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 08:05:39AM +0200, Moritz Barsnick wrote:
>   
>> And is a progressive DVD player's deinterlacer worse than any of
>> mencoder's algorithms? Any comments, experience?
>>     
>
> No, it's much better, because it will preserve 60 fps rather than
> dropping to 30 fps. (Or 50/25 for pal..)
>   
Even if you have an HD TV, and an upsampling DVD player, the image that 
the player sends to the TV is going to be 29.97 fps, (or in the case of 
PAL, 25fps). There are a number of DVD players that will recognize 
progressive content (23.976 or 25 fps) and send that to the TV, if the 
TV is capable of accepting progressive content. My upsampling DVD player 
takes the image and deinterlaces it before sending it to the TV as 720p 
material over an HDMI link. In no case will the DVD player send 59.94 or 
50 frames per second to a TV set - fields, sure, but not frames. If the 
TV is an LCD, plasma, or projection TV, it's going to have to 
deinterlace any interlaced content before it scales it up to display on 
the fixed resolution screen.

So, the real question is, is the realtime "one size fits all" 
deinterlacer in your TV or DVD player going to be better than the 
variety of deinterlacing filters built into Mencoder. The answer is 
maybe not. Try it either way and see which looks better in the end. My 
point is that it is all about the device(s) you are going to be viewing 
the content on. Standard Definition TV is just about the only device 
that interlacing makes sense on.