[MPlayer-users] any luck playing 1080i content through VGA output to HDTV?

[RC]

On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 18:53:22 -0500 (EST)
nr at eecs.harvard.edu (Norman Ramsey) wrote:

> It's clear that 720p content will work just fine, but I'm not quite
> sure how to play interlaced 1080i content in true interlaced mode. 

MPlayer doesn't support outputting interlaced video to an interlaced
display.  I'd very much like to do just that on a standard TV (without
spending $200+ on a special card for the purpose).

The general suggestion is to re-encode your video to double frame-rate
with tfields...  I'm sure that'll take quite some CPU power with 1080
video.  Besides that, it still really doesn't work well (IMO).  You have
to play-back everything with -noframedrop, so you'll need a very fast
CPU, and nothing CPU-intensive running in the background, or else you'll
get a horrible-looking uneven and jumping/flickering output.

Plus there's on-screen graphics...  Often (for sports, news, etc) there
will be horizontal lines across the screen.  Often these lines are only
a couple pixels tall, and line-up perfectly when natively played-back
on the screen.  However, when you play back the tfields output, those
lines no longer match-up directly with the scan-lines on the TV, causing
it to continually "jump".

So, basically, for interlaced playback of any kind, I suggest finding
something other than MPlayer.

> (Even with deinterlacing filters, 1080i content looks pretty crappy on
> my current progressive 1280x1024 display.)

Is your system fast enough to do that in realtime without droping
many frames?  Are you sure you want to deinterlace rather than using an
inverse telecine filter?  Which deinterlacers are you trying?  etc