[HN Gopher] Interlacing, Deinterlacing, and Everything in Between
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       Interlacing, Deinterlacing, and Everything in Between
        
       Author : MindGods
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2021-05-16 05:56 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nicole.express)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nicole.express)
        
       | msla wrote:
       | > We hit a strange truth about analog monochrome television: the
       | vertical resolution is strictly limited: it's the number of lines
       | you draw. But the horizontal resolution, the resolution within
       | each line, is basically infinite; it's a purely analog signal.
       | The only thing that holds it back is how quickly the electronics
       | in your television can keep up.
       | 
       | No, it's strictly limited by the bandwidth of the television
       | signal. You could have infinitely responsive circuitry but you'd
       | still have horizontal resolution limited by the bandwidth of the
       | video portion of the broadcast TV signal.
       | 
       | About all you can say is that analog TV does not have pixels.
       | 
       | Anyway, here's a video (part of a series) on how analog TV works:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4UgZBs7ZGo
       | 
       | Full playlist:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUGEfwEl0uW...
        
         | whatshisface wrote:
         | > _About all you can say is that analog TV does not have
         | pixels._
         | 
         | Color analog TVs have discrete patches of different phosphors.
        
           | TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
           | Those aren't really pixels though: the signal can (and does)
           | vary within them.
        
       | Hackbraten wrote:
       | > Capacitors were still called condensers.
       | 
       | Funny that in German, a capacitor is still a _Kondensator_ to
       | this day.
        
         | trotFunky wrote:
         | The French word has kept the root too : "condensateur" !
        
       | jayd16 wrote:
       | Great pun in the title.
        
       | chrisseaton wrote:
       | What does industry do about interlacing?
       | 
       | I understand many TV shows were recorded and mastered on video
       | with interlacing. When they re-release the TV shows for example
       | for Netflix - what are they currently doing?
        
         | jlarcombe wrote:
         | Dont know about Netflix but I believe the BBC archive uses
         | Martin Weston's adaptive 3-field deinterlacer. I think it's out
         | of patent now and is available in ffmpeg and similar...
        
           | aardvark179 wrote:
           | The BBC has an easier job than NTSC based outfits because
           | filmed material will have been captured at 25 frames per
           | second and converted to 50 fields per second. They are less
           | likely to have problems like 3:2 interlacing breaking in an
           | edit which used to be quite common in NTSC.
        
         | cogman10 wrote:
         | Last I heard, netflix has studios send them progressive video
         | and lets them deal with de-interlacing.
         | 
         | AFAIK, for enthusiasts, the best deinterlacer is "QTGMC"
         | http://avisynth.nl/index.php/QTGMC
         | 
         | For stuff shot like post 2015, I don't think anyone is
         | interlacing anymore. Everything is progressive.
         | 
         | https://netflixtechblog.com/high-quality-video-encoding-at-s...
        
           | ubercow13 wrote:
           | TV broadcasts are often still interlaced in some places
        
         | toast0 wrote:
         | Ideally, they deliver it to Netflix in the original form,
         | properly marked as interlaced (or not) or for the small handful
         | of shows filmed in 24p, as original films, marked as such
         | (rather than presented with a 3:2 pulldown as originally
         | broadcast).
         | 
         | In practice (based on experience as a viewer), things are kind
         | of messy, and sometimes the markings must be off, or someone
         | did a really poor deinterlace, and there's visible combing all
         | over, ugh.
         | 
         | Netflix, or my streaming player, or my display can all
         | deinterlace, so there's no need for the source to do it.
        
           | cogman10 wrote:
           | From what I've read, Netflix has been investing quite a bit
           | towards automatically detecting these sorts of issues and
           | rejecting video that's been poorly handled by the studios.
           | AFAIK, they reject interlaced content.
           | 
           | From a compression standpoint, netflix wants everything to be
           | progressive. Interlaced media (funnily) requires a lot more
           | bandwidth to transmit with modern codecs. I say funnily
           | because interlacing was a technique to save bandwidth for
           | analog transmissions. It gives the illusion of a higher
           | framerate. Unfortunately, modern video codecs work by
           | tracking object movement from one frame to the next.
           | Interlacing really messes that up requiring more bits spent
           | for the same amount of quality.
           | 
           | Some of the older codecs have interlacing built into the
           | standard (mpeg2 and h264). Newer ones have banned it all
           | together (VP9, AV1) due to the codec complexity it introduces
           | for very little benefit.
           | 
           | https://netflixtechblog.com/high-quality-video-encoding-
           | at-s...
        
             | stormbrew wrote:
             | > It gives the illusion of a higher framerate.
             | 
             | I mean, it doesn't really give the illusion of it. It _is_
             | higher frame rate when recorded from a camera[1], as most
             | TV was. The fields are independent moments in time (and you
             | can very clearly see this in freeze-frames of interlaced
             | motion, that 's part of what combing is).
             | 
             | What it gives the illusion of is greater vertical
             | resolution.
             | 
             | [1] video game systems that used interlacing, like the n64,
             | playstation, and up until the hdmi era, did not usually do
             | this afaik, opting to instead drop the frame rate to 30fps
             | with 2 fields per frame, so they really were in many ways
             | the worst of all worlds.
        
               | TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
               | > up until the HDMI era
               | 
               | I think that's wrong: didn't PS2-era consoles use
               | interlacing to get higher resolution? You're definitely
               | right for PS1 and earlier though.
        
               | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
               | I think what parent is saying is that camera-captured
               | interlaced video was displaying scanlines from
               | _different_ images in each field, whereas game consoles
               | using interlacing displayed the even /odd lines of the
               | _same_ image in two fields.
               | 
               | Thus parent's argument is that we can consider camera-
               | captured interlaced video to be 60 (or 50 for PAL) fps
               | despite being interlaced, but games using interlacing
               | were 30 fps. It makes sense to me.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | It was a choice of the game. There were definitely truly
               | 60FPS interlaced games during the PS2 generation.
        
               | NathanielK wrote:
               | > video game systems that used interlacing, like the n64,
               | playstation, and up until the hdmi era, did not usually
               | do this afaik, opting to instead drop the frame rate to
               | 30fps with 2 fields per frame, so they really were in
               | many ways the worst of all worlds.
               | 
               | 480i Nintendo consoles (N64, GCN, WII) all had many 60FPS
               | games. The 30FPS limit was almost always because of the
               | relatively underpowered hardware. Some N64 games even ran
               | at 20FPS!
        
       | spookthesunset wrote:
       | Technology Connections has a good video on how CRT's work:
       | https://youtu.be/l4UgZBs7ZGo
        
         | Rendello wrote:
         | Captain Disillusion has a good video on interlacing
         | specifically:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eu_KjKsnpM
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-17 23:02 UTC)