Can Interlaced videos be played non-Interlaced?

[Ted Wagner]

I posted this question in the Firemonkey section, but since I'm using Delphi XE2 VCL and still need an answer to this question I thought I'd post it here.

I have a video from a Sony camera that is recorded interlaced. When I play it with Windows Media Player, it plays beautifully. When I play it with a VLDSVideoPlayer, the fields are not properly combined and the resulting flagging is rather ... bad.

What does WMP know that VLDSVideoPlayer doesn't? Isn't this part of the playback handled at the decoder level?

Is there a way to get the VLDSVideoPlayer to do whatever WMP is doing?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated!

(The video can be downloaded here for another week or so.)

ted

[Dave]

Hi!

I don't see much difference between MP and a VLDSPlayer playing it, last frame from video:



or is this bad quality? (cool vid btw)

Regards,
Dave

[Ted Wagner]

Dave,

I'm unable to post a snapshot of what I'm getting (unless there's a way to do it inline here, but I don't see how), but if I freeze-frame the video (using my VCL app) near the beginning I can see the flagging very clearly in the airplane props. When I do the exact same thing with WMP, no flagging at all -- nice and clean and clear.

-ted

(12-16-2011 04:20 AM)Dave Wrote:  Hi!

I don't see much difference between MP and a VLDSPlayer playing it, last frame from video:



or is this bad quality? (cool vid btw)

Regards,
Dave

[Dave]

I replied to your email.

For posting images you can use tinypic.com for example btw.

Dave

[Ted Wagner]

I've solved this problem for the most part, and here's what I learned.

(1) Interlacing can be done by the codec or by a downstream VMR filter. I'm using the MainConcept MPEG-2 Video Decoder, and it has a control panel which allows me to set "Deinterlace" to one of Weave, Vertical Filter, Field interpolation, VMR, or Auto. When set this to "Field interpolation", I get the same results that Windows Media Player provides. (It was previously at "Auto". I haven't tried any of the other settings yet.)

(2) In the middle of learning all this I tried installing and testing VisioForge's SDK (Delphi XE2). It does not appear to support playback to multiple windows, and the demo crashed so hard I had to reboot my (new) Windows 7 Pro desktop. Even worse, it caused MPG playback in my VideoLab applications to use the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder instead of the MainConcept decoder. Not only were the results AWFUL, but all attempts to restore the MainConcept decoder failed. The only thing that succeeded was uninstalling both the VisioForge SDK *and* the MainConcept MPEG Decoder pack and re-installing the latter.

-ted