Can Interlaced videos be played non-Interlaced?

[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