2010-12-24, 12:29
Yes interlaced output is not at all supported by XBMC or any other media playback software I can think of.
My experience is similar to yours in that it is better in many circumstances just to pass the video on to the TV as is and let the TV work out when to deinterlace or inverse-telecine and perform any other kind of video processing, just like most set-top boxes like DVD players for example.
What you describe is exactly what happens for most interlaced video material. It's generally pot luck when an interlaced video is played, field order is correct and if a graphics card vertical sync is missed for some reason, field order goes wrong (or if it was wrong goes right).
I must add I have only tinkered with XBMC code and I am not an XBMC developer.
I have been unable to suggest any patches to XBMC to support interlaced playback due to my lack of knowledge of XBMC code. However I have been experimenting with a somewhat ancient FFMPEG tutorial here:
http://dranger.com/ffmpeg/
So far I have managed to write video fields to the graphics card frame buffer at field rate as I described earlier. I have not yet viewed the result on a proper interlaced display like a TV. With correct vertical scaling (i.e. none) I am confident it will work, at the expense of switching video resolution to match the video source.
Stu-e
My experience is similar to yours in that it is better in many circumstances just to pass the video on to the TV as is and let the TV work out when to deinterlace or inverse-telecine and perform any other kind of video processing, just like most set-top boxes like DVD players for example.
What you describe is exactly what happens for most interlaced video material. It's generally pot luck when an interlaced video is played, field order is correct and if a graphics card vertical sync is missed for some reason, field order goes wrong (or if it was wrong goes right).
I must add I have only tinkered with XBMC code and I am not an XBMC developer.
I have been unable to suggest any patches to XBMC to support interlaced playback due to my lack of knowledge of XBMC code. However I have been experimenting with a somewhat ancient FFMPEG tutorial here:
http://dranger.com/ffmpeg/
So far I have managed to write video fields to the graphics card frame buffer at field rate as I described earlier. I have not yet viewed the result on a proper interlaced display like a TV. With correct vertical scaling (i.e. none) I am confident it will work, at the expense of switching video resolution to match the video source.
Stu-e
