Deinterlacing

From MythTV Official Wiki
Revision as of 03:21, 27 February 2009 by Bradtem (talk | contribs) (Available Deinterlacing Systems)

Jump to: navigation, search

Time.png Outdated: The information on this page may no longer be relevant to the current release of MythTV, 34.0. Please consider helping to update it. This page was last modified on 2009-02-27.

MythTV Deinterlacing

Deinterlacing is the process of converting traditional Interlaced Video into a Progressive Picture that can be displayed on modern non interlaced display devices such as LCD or Plasma screens.

There is a lot of general information on deinterlacing at Wikipedia in these two articles:

MythTV has several options for Deinterlacing. The configuration options for deinterlacing can be found under Mythfrontend->Utilities Setup->Setup->TV Settings->Playback. On Playback Profiles (3/9) edit each entry, The Primary and Fallback deinterlacer may be set on the 2nd sub-page.

GeneralPlayback.jpg (Note, this screen capture is for Myth 0.20)

Choosing a Deinterlacer

The best deinterlacers can require lots of CPU, and/or VDPAU or OpenGL video hardware, particularly for 1080i content. You may find that you have enough resources to use a powerful deinterlacer for your SDTV (480i) content, but you need to use a less resource-hungry deinterlacer for 1080i. (720p content does not require deinterlacing.)

To custom tune exactly for your system, you may need to just try different deinterlacers to see which look best on your screen and which don't overtax your CPU. If you see signs of tearing (discontinuities in the video), jittery video, prebuffering pauses and your CPU usage is high, you may be overtaxing things. If you see lots of "combing," where moving objects have alternating teeth, you may not be deinterlacing at all.

Note that the deinterlacers available vary based on your renderer. For example, you will find many more deinterlacing choices if you use the OpenGL renderer and some high-quality hardware deinterlacers with the VDPAU system. (VDPAU is available only in MythTV 0.22 or later, or patched versions of 0.21.)

Double Framerate

The best deinterlacers will double the frame rate (typically 29.97fps in the USA) to 59.94fps, which is the rate at which the fields (half-frames) of interlaced video occur. For each field, they will build a whole frame. This requires that your display be able to operate at this doubled frame rate. Surprisingly some displays are just a hair below that, in which case Myth will switch to your "fallback" deinterlacer, as set on your configuration screen. Doubling the frame rate requires a lot more resources. Some video comes at 25fps, which doubles to 50fps and should not have a problem with the monitor refresh rate. You may also encounter problems with loss of deinterlacing if doing time stretch.

Native deinterlacing

Your TV probably has a fairly good quality hardware deinterlacer. To make use of it, you must have your video card output an interlaced video signal to the TV. This typically requires, in X, a special modeline for the display. Because you will not want to use interlaced output for 720p or 1080p video, you will want to set up MythTV to use different video modes depending on what type of stream is being played. When using native deinterlacing, you would set your deinterlacer to none. You will not be able to zoom, and may have trouble doing time stretch, but you will get quality deinterlacing with minimal CPU.

Please note that many people have had problems getting NVIDIA video cards to properly output an interlaced video signal. Some have played tricks, like using a 60 frame per second 540 line mode line, and applying special tricks.


Available Deinterlacing Systems

These are arranged in (rough) order of preference. You probably want the best one your CPU and GPU can handle. HW acceleration (in OpenGL and inherent in VDPAU) will let you handle a better deinterlacer. Using double framerate (2x mode) will do a better job but cost more resources.

  • One Field
This "deinterlaces" by throwing away half the picture. Use only on lower-resolution displays or if you can't do anything else. It is clean, though.
  • Linear Blend
  • Kernel (Less Motion Blur)
This requires SSE support compiled into your Kernel. It blends where things are moving, does not deinterlace where things are stable.
  • Greedy Motion
  • yadif
something apparently Michael Niedermayer wrote for mplayer/ffmpeg that's fast but more CPU intensive than above


MythTV has a number of 2x deinterlacers which attempt to turn 30 Hz (or 25 Hz) interlaced video into 60 Hz (or 50 Hz) progressive video. The aim is to improve on non-2x deinterlacers which look fine for static scenes but create jumpiness when the scene contains motion.

  • Bob 2X Framerate
Shows first one field then the other scaled to the entire height of the picture. For low- or no-motion scenes Bob 2X discards half the vertical resolution of the picture.
This requires Xv or XvMC video acceleration
This is also called Line Doubling and more information can be seen here (under line doubling): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinterlacing#Deinterlacing_methods
  • Interlaced

A smarter bob, which doubles the frame rate and tries to act like a TV with phosphor persistence, which was what interlaced signals are designed for.

  • Yadif 2X and GreedyH 2X
Attempt to recover additional spatial information by looking forward and/or back in the video stream. GreedyH looks only at the prior field, while Yadif looks both forwards and backwards.


Important.png Note: If using a Nvidia TV output (composite/svideo) & watching PAL/NTSC signals there should be no need to deinterlace video because the TV output's flicker filter's default setting (of 127) makes interlaced material look perfectly natural - exhibited on FX5200 svideo output - YMMV.

Special VDPAU Deinterlacers

(to be written)