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

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 08:22:32PM -0800, RC wrote:
> 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".

All of this doesn't apply with HDTV. The lines are no longer 1-2
pixels tall but 10 pixels tall, and the two fields basically line up
perfectly due to the excessive oversampling.

Rich