So I finally got my copy of the platinum 4-hour super extendo-matic version of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings and I started watching it last night. The bass was quite impresive, but I found the progressive scan deinterlacing support of my gear to be really mucking things up.

The relevant gear here is a Panasonic DVD RP-56 (with the fancy Sage/Faroudja chipset that discriminating hifi nuts seem to prefer) connected to a Hitachi 43" HDTV 43UWX10B (vintage 2001) that has its own built-in deinterlacer of unknown provenance.

The problem is best demonstrated just after Bilbo puts on the ring to escape from his eleventeenth birthday party. There's a scene where the invisible Bilbo goes through a gate and up the stairs, with the camera panning down, right, and up. With either the DVD or TV's deinterlacer active, the results were very jerky, not smooth at all. DIsabling both deinterlacers, the results were smooth as silk.

Any thoughts on this? I generally have to disable the TV's deinterlacer when watching anything on the TiVo because I get horrible combing. Normally, the DVD's deinterlacer works pretty damn good, but this time, with the weird panning, it just crapped out.

Thoughts on this? Are newer deinterlacers any smarter?