[MPlayer-users] show interlaced/progressive info..

[Tuukka Toivonen]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, D Richard Felker III wrote:

>> > By decoding the video and guessing. Not acceptable.
>> Acceptable

I think it's acceptable and even a good idea too, but...

>Even if the guessing part were acceptable, the decoding part isn't.
>You can't go and decode a big block of video at startup just to print
>information. It's way too costly in startup time and messes up the

... I agree with this too. Instead there should be a "dummy" filter
(-vf) that doesn't do anything to the video but just displays whether
it thinks it's interlaced or not. Or even better, display that in
the beginning and whenever interlaced video changes into non-interlaced
or vice versa, report that and the time.

>> because mplayer/mencoder can sometimes better guess if a video
>> is interlaced than a human eye.
>It can? Would you care to show me how?

Yeah, just come to look from my text-terminal....
(why do you think computers were invented in the first hand, if not
automatizing things?)

>BTW, you should always assume TV captures are interlaced unless you're
>sure the original came from film or animation.

If trying to deinterlace noninterlaced video, will it decrease image
quality? My guess/hope is that most of the time it doesn't.

A bit off the topic, it would be nice if filters could be changed during
playback/encoding based on frame number, just like quantization parameter
can be changed with libavcodec. Or is it already possible, I don't think
so?

Hmm... and when will mplayer be able to read Broadcast2000 *.htal files,
that would save 120 GB of my disk space?-)