[MPlayer-users] Detecting interlacing

[Tony Houghton]

In <20060220215407.79bfb3ad.rcooley at spamcop.net>, RC wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:01:48 +0000
> Tony Houghton <h at realh.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > Is there a way to detect whether a video (in particular vdr
> > recordings) is interlaced with something like mplayer -identify?
> 
> Nope.  Doing it by-eye is easy enough.  I've been considering something
> like a video filter that will only detect and report if a video is
> interlaced/hard telecined/progressive, but I'm not sure it's even worth
> the effort...

I think it would be worth it, and to go even further and have a filter
that can enable and disable deinterlacing on the fly. I'm writing a
script for a HTPC application to optimise MPlayer's options depending on
what it's playing. It would be nice for non tecchy users not to have to
check the video first then adjust options manually.

Currently the main thing the script does is check the video's aspect
ratio and set monitoraspect accordingly because it's generally best for
MPlayer to think that the TV's 4:3 when playing 4:3 videos. (a) Because
TVs can potentially do hardware scaling with less loss of quality than
video cards, and (b) because MPlayer's automatic setting will be wrong
if, for example, it plays a TV recording which starts off with
widescreen adverts while the main programme is 4:3.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk