Getting rid of the Grey Bar in Highdef TS clips?

[Guest]

Hi,

i was just wondering is it possible to remove the 8pixel grey bar on high def ts clips that are 1920x1080 but appear as 1920x1088?

i know on the pc side they have figured out a way to get rid of it i believe with the subpicture filter but i cant find that on the mac?

i would also like to use deinterlacing so i cant crop it at the same time right?

Also what favorite deinterlacing method do you recommend?

thanks

[gusax]

To remove the grey bar and have deinterlacing on at the same time you'll need VLC 0.8.2.

Open preferences and click the "Advanced" checkbox in the lower left corner of the window. If you don't, some options you need won't be visible.
Then select Video > Filters and check Crop and Deinterlacing. Notice that the text
crop:deinterlace
will appear in the text field right after the text "Video filter module".
Change it so that it reads
deinterlace:crop
instead. That way vlc will deinterlace first and crop later. The other way around (crop:deinterlace) won't work. (At least not for me)

Click the small triangle next to Filters (if it's not opened already) and select crop in the list of filters and make sure the crop geometry is
1920x1080+0+9
Don't use automatic cropping.

Click deinterlace right below crop and choose your deinterlace method in both drop-down menus. (I have no idea why there are two identical menus.)
I use blend since that is what I think looks best.

By doing this, vlc will always start with deinterlacing turned on and a lot of menu options will be greyed out because of this, including the one where you select which screen you want to use for fullscreen playback.
Crop doesn't seem to be active on anything but 1920x1088-movies though but that's what we want anyway.

If you want to use a secondary screen for fullscreen playback, or if fullscreen playback uses the wrong screen and you want to change it, go back to Video and click the triangle next to "Output modules", select macosx in the list of modules and manually change the video device from 1 to 2 (or the other way around).
The reason you must do this manually is because Video Device becomes greyed out in the menus if deinterlacing is turned on by default.

[Guest]

thanks a lot, it works perfectly

[Guest]

also does your high def clips play smoothly for the whole length of the clip or movie?

if so what kind of mac do you have? i have a powermac dual 2.3 with 1gig of ram and the radeon 9650(card sucks)
and every once in awhile it drops some frames.

anyway to improve performance?

[gusax]

My clips play perfectly, vlc does not drop frames for me. I can even play the 1080p h284 movie trailers from apple.com without dropped frames.

Powermac 2x2GHz, 1 gig ram. Video card won't matter since VLC isn't accelerated by the graphics card anyway.

Try using vlc 0.7.2 instead of 0.8.x. At least on my computer, version 0.7.2 only requires around 40% cpu whereas 0.8.x takes up almost 100% on the same 1080i clip with deinterlacing set to blend on both.

0.7.2 can't both crop and deinterlace though, you have to pick one or the other

I use 0.8.2 because of deinterlace:crop and since Apple updated the firmware that controls the fans, the little annoying one right behind the harddrives never spin up anymore so I'm not disturbed by the fact that vlc 0.8.2 needs 100% cpu.

If you know how to compile, you could probably get a performance boost by compiling a G5 optimized version of 0.8.2 (or 0.7.2). If you figure out how to compile 0.8.2, please post a howto on the forum
Or better yet - upload it somewhere so I can download it! I have tried to compile a lot of different vlc versions and it never works for me.

[fkuehne]

A howto for compiling VLC on OSX is available here: http://developers.videolan.org/vlc.

It isn't very hard to do, but takes a bit of time (VLC itself ~20 minutes, 3rd party libraries ~1 hour on a iMac G5 2GHz).


But I doubt that compiling an own version will help, because we only use AltiVec as CPU-acceleration, which is enabled in our own builds as well.
Did you 2 reset your preferences after upgrading to 0.8.2? Perhaps this solves the issue for you. Delete the VLC-folder inside your preferences-folder (~/Library/Preferences).

If you have any questions about the compilation, feel free to ask them here.

[Guest]

yah i'll try deleting the preferences and then do the deinterlace:cropping thing again.

i dont know why frames drop, i'll close every single app and have nothing running and see if it helps. I can play 1080p from apple the trailers just fine with no frames dropping and other apps running. I hope i can get the ts clips to play fine cause its annoying having a stutter every once in awhile.

so the benefit is minimal if i complie and i have no idea how to do that haha.
i guess i shouldnt bother cause it'll probably take me forever to do.

[Guest]

also why kind of settings do you click for video prefrences in options?

on default it has enable video checked and skip frames checked? should i uncheck skipped frames? thanks

[Guest]

sorry for posting too much and i should really get a nickname so i can edit my posts. sorry.

when i use the deinterlace mode : blend and the crop 1920x1080+0+9

i get no gray bar whatsoever. However if i use the deinterlace mode: Linear i get a little grey bar that vibrates when im playing a clip. its like 1pixel. anyway i can get rid of it? should i use something like 1920x1080+0+11? i have no idea how to do the #'s part. thanks

[gusax]

I don't know how to remove the thin vibrating grey line, sorry

If you look closely the whole screen vibrates, not just the bottom line. That's why I use blend instead of the other deinterlacers. Blend is the only one that doesn't make the picture all jumpy. Except for discard of course but discard makes the picture look blurry (since it's throwing away half the lines all the time) :-/

[gusax]

A howto for compiling VLC on OSX is available here: http://developers.videolan.org/vlc.

It isn't very hard to do, but takes a bit of time (VLC itself ~20 minutes, 3rd party libraries ~1 hour on a iMac G5 2GHz).


But I doubt that compiling an own version will help, because we only use AltiVec as CPU-acceleration, which is enabled in our own builds as well.
Did you 2 reset your preferences after upgrading to 0.8.2? Perhaps this solves the issue for you. Delete the VLC-folder inside your preferences-folder (~/Library/Preferences).

If you have any questions about the compilation, feel free to ask them here.

I've tried trashing the preferences and it didn't make any difference

I have no idea what happened between versions 0.7.2 and 0.8.0 that makes 0.8.x take up 129% cpu on the same clip as 0.7.2 uses "only" 69% but something changed for the worse I'm afraid.
(mpeg2 transport stream, 1080i, both versions of vlc had deinterlacing "blend" turned on)

If you don't think compiling will make any difference then I won't try it again. (I did follow the guide the last time though)