Frame Interleaving Playback Problem

[P4blo]

Hi, downloaded the latest version of VLC on recommendation from others as a really flexible player. I've been using Windows Media Player 10 and 11 a bit and while it seems to give great picture quality in terms of smooth frames it sometimes doesn't pick up AC3 5.1 streams correctly and just plays them back as stereo. Every time this happens I can switch to VLC and it gets the 5.1 working every time. The trouble is, the video output is poor!

The frames dont come out quite as smooth as media player (doesn't matter what format, xvid, TS, mpeg-2, u name it, they all stutter a little unevenly. But the REAL problem is the frame update. It's Interleaved! The videos I'm playing are progressive yet you get jaggies appearing down the screen instead of each frame coming in cleanly one at a time.

Imagine playing an FPS game at high frame rates on an LCD with VSync disabled. That's the effect I'm talking about. I almost need to enable vsync for the player!

Why is it so poor? This is all default setting, just installed. 2GB Ram, Core 2 X6800. CPU load on less than 10% ! Tried using NVidia Pure Video drivers and switched accelerator to this in VLC. No joy.

Typically I'm playing back 720 and 1080p content in the formats mentioned above.

Really appreciate any help,

P4blo

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Have you activated the deinterlacing filter ?

[Tappen]

I end up turning the deinterlace Blend filter on with almost every video in order to compensate for the somewhat rough output of Vlc.

It might be an issue somewhere in Vlc, but more likely ffmpeg hasn't kept up with the times in terms of automatic jitter/noise reduction like non-open-source products like the NVidia PureVideo DirectShow filter provide. This is much more noticeable at HD resolutions, but open-source projects often take a long time to recognize and react to such end-user experience issues.

It's not like there's a specific feature missing or bug you can point to, it's a general quality issue that becomes more apparent as digital monitors become prevalent and video resolutions increase. The need to compensate in software for the effects of compression, which worked fine at "tricking" the eye when output devices were analog but now need a lot more help, is becoming apparent.

[P4blo]

Hmm I think I get the picture. Doesn't sound like a specific issue I can fix at this time. Will try the de-interlacing filter and see if that helps. Have a few other players that all give awesome picture quality, they're just all over the place with 5.1. I hope the VLC developers can address this soon...

Thanks for your advice.

P4blo