Handbrake help

[robertbiferi]

I am using Handbrake and need help with something.

I understand that if you open an Interlaced video and pick any of the options from the De Interlace dropdown list Handbrake will apply the De Interlace to that video and then give it to the H246 to encode it as Prograsive.

I get all of this but then I just found out.

If I pick the option OFF in the De Interlace dropdown list Handbrake will give the video a De Interlace Weave and then give it to H246 to encode as Prograsive.

So I say if you set De Interlace to OFF it sould not apply any De Interlace to the video.

But I foundout that if you set De Interlace to OFF it still gives a De Interlace Weave because it must give some kind of De Interlace befor it give it to H246.

Because Handbrake must tell H246 that every video it gives it is Prograsive.

Does this sound right or am I not understanding something?

[admin]

From what I can gather, the "Off" setting simply tells Handbrake that your source video is progressive, and as such, when it tells the x264 encoder that the source is progressive, x264 treats it as progressive and encodes accordingly (progressive output).

When you use any of the interlacing options, you are telling Handbrake that your source video is interlaced, and then Handbrake will convert that into progressive and try to eliminate the problems associated with interlaced video (or rather, how the decoder treats interlaced video). Once the video is "de-interlaced", it then feeds it to x264 and x264 encodes accordingly (again, progressive output).

I think what you want is for Handbrake to tell x264 that the source is interlaced, do nothing with the source and feed it as it is to x264 to encode (so interlaced output), but I don't think this is possible with Handbrake.

Also, if you had to use a deinterlace mode, I recommend you used the Decomb filter if you need to de-interlace.

This guide may also be of help:

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/DeinterlacingGuide

[robertbiferi]

Thanks but

I think I get what you are telling me.

If I open an Interlaced video in Handbrake and pick any of the De Interlace options from the dropdown list Handbrake will apply that De Interlace option to the video to make it Prograsive.

Then give it to H246 to encode as Prograsive.

But if I pick OFF from the De Interlace Dropdown list Hanbrake will not apply any of the De Interlace options to the video but it will still tell H246 that the video it is gibing it is Prograsive and to encode as Prograsive.

Do I have this right?

[robertbiferi]

thanks but

Do I understand what you told me?

[admin]

But if I pick OFF from the De Interlace Dropdown list Hanbrake will not apply any of the De Interlace options to the video but it will still tell H246 that the video it is gibing it is Prograsive and to encode as Prograsive.

Do I have this right?

This is correct. When you pick "off", you're telling Handbrake that your source video *is* progressive (this is the only way you can tell Handbrake your video is progressive), and because you're specifically telling Handbrake the source video is progressive, it will tell x264 to output to progressive as well.

Basically, Handbrake wants to turn everything into progressive before it passes to x264, if it isn't progressive already (if it is, you need to use the OFF deinterlace setting).

While this seems to suggest a flaw in Handbrake in that you can't have interlaced input -> interlaced output, the truth is that you don't really need interlaced video these days, what with there been hardly any screens left that can show interlaced video properly without the player doing some deinterlacing and introducing the bob and weave artifacts. So you should use Handbrake to deinterlace your interlaced videos and convert them to progressive using Decomb to get rid of the artifacts without increasing encoding times too much.

[robertbiferi]

thanks but

Thank you for all your help and I have a fue more things I need to know but first I would like to tell you what I do know and understand.

As for Interlaced video I know it works like this.

On a CRT screen the First Field or you can say Top Field is dawn top to bottom left to right in a zig zag manner. This makes one image on screen and as this starts to fade away the Second Field or you can say Bottom Field is drawn top to bottom Left to right in a zig zag maner and this is one more image.

Two Fields make up one Frame and there are 29.97 FPS or you can say 30 FPS
and they say the Fields are Interlaced because after the First Field starts to fade the second Field is drawn.

And every Field is it's own image and every Field will have very very diferant movements in it.

Now that I told you what I know I will ask these fue things?

1.
I am going to be puting a videos I have into MP4 because I read it will give good video picture at Very Low Bit Rates. So I was going to use
500 bps 29.97 FPS 640x480 Frame Size.

I do have other video converting programs I use now and then and they all have MP4 but use diferant codeds and I wanted to know witch one in best with MP4
AVC H264
MP4 XviD
MP4 DivX
I want the smallest file size but have good video picture?

2.
I have VLC 1.1.2 and it can convert videos to diferant Formats. In the settings for Frame Size and Bit Rate and things like that it had a check Box De Interlace. Now if I put a check in this Box it will De Interlace the video and output Prograsive I get this.
But if I don't put a check in this Box will it just output the same video or does this meen it will Interlace it?

3.
And I have Format Factory 2.60 just for converting video to other formats and in the output settings it has a setting De Interlace and you can set it to YES or NO.
If I set it to NO it will not De Interlace the video but will it keep it as is or does this meen it will Interlace it??

[admin]

Xvid/DivX are pretty similar, most going with Xvid due to its open source nature. H.264 would be more efficient. You could try encoding a small section of the video in all of these formats and see which one looks best.

Not quite sure about the other two software, since I don't really use them, but I suspect they would work in a similar manner to Handbrake. You might have to use x264 in command line mode:

http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings

But as the Wiki says, "you should only encode interlaced if you intend to display the video on an interlaced display (or can't deinterlace the video before sending it to x264)"

[robertbiferi]

thanks but

Well I know how Interlace works.
First all the Od Lines are drawn on screen like this

Od Line
..........
Od Line
..........
Od Line
..........
Od Line

Then as it starts to fade away the Even Lines are drawn like this

..........
Even Line
..........
Even Line
..........
Even Line
..........

But in Prograsive I know every Line is drawn one right after the other like this

Od Line
Even Line
Od Line
Even Line
Od Line
Even Line
Od Line

To me I never understood Prograsive because the way Interlace was able to work is because after all the Od Lines atart to Fade away then the Even Lines would be drawn.

So you never could see both Fields onscreen at the same time.
But with Prograsive you would see both Even Od and Even Lines on screen at the same time because the CRT screen does not drawn all Od Lines then Even Lines.

It draws are Lines one after the other.

Or am I not getting some thing?

[admin]

A true progressive source does not have the concept of odd/even fields, that's only for interlaced. Progressive and digital displays use the concept of pixels for display, and so lines actually don't mean much as an entire frame, with all the lines (and pixels), is rendered at the same time (well, the "same time" as our eyes can perceive it, any way).

Interlacing is in fact an unnatural process designed to save bandwidth, by taking an entire frame with all the lines and only showing half of them at any one time - progressive simply removes this now unnecessary procedure from the production chain. Interlacing is a technique that has had its day, mainly because the displays necessary to display these types of pictures are all but gone.

And I'm not just talking about digital displays. Progressive scan CRTs do exists, and in fact, most of the later models (EDTVs, HDTVs) were of this type, as were most CRT PC monitor. Only the older CRT SDTVs were interlaced. (even most of the earlier HDTVs that were marked as 1080i, were actually progressive displays, which internally converted the 1080i picture to probably 720p/480p/576p)

In order for these non interlaced displays to display an interlaced picture, the picture would have to be deinterlaced first, because progressive displays cannot display interlaced video natively. That would mean various techniques to combine the odd/even fields into one frame, and then removing the artifacts that are produced by this process. The only question is should you leave your player/TV to do the deinterlacing (possibly using a very quick and dirty method, although some do have advanced deinterlacing chips), or should you let your encoder (eg. Handbrake) do it.

Is your concern related to how a progressively encoded video would look on an interlaced CRT display? I would say that if your progressive video player is capable of connecting to such a display, then you don't really have to worry about this at all.

[robertbiferi]

thanks but

I just never new how Prograsive displays worked.

So tell me I do have it down how Interlace works?
First all the Od Lines are drawn then when they start to fade away all the Even Lines are drawn.
Do I have this Right?

And they make the Even Lines start to be drawn after the Od Lines start to fade away because they are to whole pictures and they can't be on screen at the same time or it would look like a Dabble image.
Do I have this?

So how can Prograsive show the Od and Even Lines at the same time it would look like a Dabble image on screen?

Do you see what I am not getting?

[admin]

Not quite. For NTSC, at 60Hz, there are 60 sub-fields being displayed per second. Each sub-field consists of the odd or even lines of some frame. It works something like this on an interlaced display:

1. 1st sub-field: display odd lines from frame 1 (so lines 1, 3, 5, 7 ...)
2. 2nd sub-field: display even lines from frame 1 (so lines 2, 4, 6, 8 ...)
3. 3rd sub-field: display odd lines from frame 2
4. 4th sub-field: display even lines from frame 2
5. And so on

On an interlaced display, if you were able to pause time (not just pause the video) and stare at any one sub-field, you would see that it is only displaying half of the lines at any one time (see picture below).



So rather than "double images", with interlaced, you're seeing "half images", but your brain tricks you into seeing the full image because it all happening at 1/60th of a second. With progressive, you simply see the whole image all the time, so if you were able to pause time again, you would see the following picture instead that consists of all the lines from the same frame (so all odd + even lines at the same time):

http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com/pictures/a-frame.jpg

But if you want to display the same interlaced video on a progressive screen, you can't do the above because there are no fields in progressive displays, only pixels and frames. So you would have to apply de-interlacing, or converting those sub-fields into frames, so basically combining the "half images" into a full image, but this can create artifacts depending on what's happening in the source (again, this link has a lot of good visual examples of deinterlacing artifacts).

[robertbiferi]

thanks but

Well this is what I read.

30 Frame go by the screen in a second.

Every Frame is made up of 2. Fields a Top Field and a Bottom Field.

The Top Field is all made up of all the Od Lines.

The Bottom Field is made up of all the Even Lines.

Do I have this down right just give me a yes or no before I go on?

[admin]

In an interlaced video, yes, the top field is the odd lines in the frame, while the bottom field is the even lines from the same frame.

In a progressive video, as I mentioned before, the concept of fields do not exist.

[robertbiferi]

thanks but

Ok well I know every Field has very little movement and the two Fields are Interlaced.

And as the Top Field fades away the Bottom Field is drawn.
Now I know the Top Field and Bottom Field togather make up one frame.

But if I could see one frame on screen it would look like a Dabble Image because eatch Field has movement this is why you one Field is drawn after the other Field fades.

This is what I ment about Dabble image do I have it right?

[admin]

I think I know what you mean now by movement, in that each field is showing a slightly different moment in time (of the video), and so when you simply combine the top and bottom fields, they don't "line up" exactly.

So a fast moving ball that's made up of 2 lines, for example, would then look like this on a progressive display:



(since each field is "recording" a different position of the ball as it moves through the air)

On a real picture, it would look like this, and you can see why the effect is sometimes called "combing", or I think what you're referring as "double image":



If the ball, or the man above, was completely still though, then it would look perfect, as the position of the ball/man doesn't changes between each field.

But this only happens when you use what's called Weave Deinterlacing (by not doing anything other than showing both fields in the same frame).

As mentioned, there are other ways to do deinterlacing, some better, such as blending, BOB ... see this page for a good list of all the techniques - you can even discard either the top or bottom field, remove the blank lines in the field (halfs the height), and then resize the picture to fill the screen.

Whichever way you do it, you won't be able to fully recreate a full resolution/detail, full movement video, from an interlaced source on a progressive screen, simply because half of the detail/movements have already been lost thanks to the way interlaced video was recorded (the whole point of interlaced video is to save bandwidth, by not storing half of the details).

But back to Handbrake ... Decomb is well recommended because it only applies the selected deinterlacing filter whenever artifacts appear (when there are no artifacts, it suggests little or no movement between fields, and they are weaved together without any issues, and with no lost resolution or movement). If you selected one of the Interlacing methods (see this guide to find out which method is used for which deinterlacing option), it will just apply one of the interlacing methods to everything, wasting time, and also possibly introducing ghosting and other effects (on Fast, anyway), and would make progressive sources look worse (Decomb is safe to use even for progressive sources, since it will not detect any combing and will just do nothing).

If you turned deinterlacing "off", it will do nothing to the input, but the input is then always assumed to be progressive. If there was an option in Handbrake to tell x264 the source is interlaced, then x264 will then encode as interlaced, with the advantage that when you play this H.264 interlaced video, the decoder (or the display) may have hardware deinterlacing, which would save you having to do deinterlacing on via Handbrake, and if it's a great deinterlacer chip, it might look better than what Handbrake can produce as well (but it depends on where you view the video, so it's not an advantage that's always true if you plan on distributing the video - in fact, on cheap players/displays, their deinterlacer will be worse than what Handbrake's deinterlacer can produce).

There's also no great bandwidth advantage in encoding in interlaced video over progressive with H.264 (simply due to the way digital compression works, which is very different to the bandwidth savings offered by analogue interlaced video).

So yes, it would be nice for Handbrake to have this feature, but it's certainly not an essential feature, which is probably why the feature is missing in the first place.