DVDs. Interlaced or progressive?

[Kris Deering]

Originally Posted by 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).

Again, this is anything but the case. DVDs are encoded as 4:2:0 YCbCr with a resolution of 480i60. They are flagged for their cadence to allow for de-interlacing to a progressive resolution of 480p60. Obviously players now offer scaling abilities that can offer various resolutions up to 1080p.

One would only wish they were encoded as 24p as that would offer judder free playback. Right now there are a few video processing solutions that can take the video and strip it down to 24p, but most don't do a very good job. Tearing and dropped frames are typically seen because the again the flags are incorrect.

I honestly don't don't where so many people are getting the idea that DVDs are encoded progressively, this has never been the case and there is no data even out there to support it