DVDs. Interlaced or progressive?

[jd213]

Hollywood DVDs are usually encoded as 24fps 480p "soft telecined" with flags telling the player to convert back to 480i, 60 fields per second. When it's encoded as 480i, it's called "hard telecined". Soft telecining also has the benefit of having less data per second so it's easier to compress within the DVD bitrate restrictions.

But when you take a look at a soft telecined DVD in a PC software player with "force weave" selected for the deinterlacing, or analyze the frames with software such as DGIndex, you will sometimes see combing which indicates that some portions weren't encoded as 480p correctly (usually just during scene/reel changes, but some DVDs like the Superbit for Leon the Professional have whole hard telecined segments). And of course, most supplementary material is hard telecined (or was shot on video to begin with).