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?

Faroudja is, generally speaking, as good as it gets straight out of a consumer 'box' (be it within the DVD player or standalone). A lot, if not most, TV's deinterlacers aren't worth the marketing effort by all accounts.

The only way to really better Faroudja is with a carefully built HTPC running DScaler, which when done right has been known to better Faroudja's $20k units.

When you say "Jerky" are you referring to something they call "Judder" in the literature at the web site you linked in your message?

I did some hunting around, and it would appear that, yes, I'm talking about judder.

[not being helpful at all]
isn't a judder the milk providing part of a jamacan cow?

Well, then, reading that article on the various deinterlacing modes, the judder would seem to be simply an unavoidable artifact of trying to play a 24-frame movie on a 30-frame progressive scan video monitor. The reason you don't notice the judder when it's running interlaced is because the fields tend to blend together better in interlaced mode.

Either that, or you're seeing the player trying to deal with error in the field coding on the disc itself. But that wouldn't explain why the TV's internal deinterlacer (which works by observing the differences between frames) would have the same problem.

It may be "unavoidable", but I'm not convinced yet. If anbody else out there in empeg-land has a progressive DVD setup and the extended LotR movie, I'd appreciate if they could check this scene out and post what they see.

(Footnote: an unexpected benefit of having a CRT projector instead of a plasma screen / LCD projector is that interlace modes are still natively supported. If you've got a fundamentally progressive device like that, then if your deinterlacer is screwing up... you loose!)

I wonder if you emailed Don Munsil or Stacey Spears with your details, if they could provide an explanation. Perhaps that scene is one that specifically fails one of their shootout tests on some of the players out there.

Well, I posted a thread on AVS Forum, where all the appropriate nuts hang out. We'll see what comes up there.

Good idea. They'll get you sorted out in no time. Report back here when you get a resolution.

See, I've been wanting to get a progressive-scan DVD player but I've been waiting for the "right one" for a couple of years. Still haven't seen one with the exact feature set I want. So I'm trying to keep my eye on progressive-scan DVD information in the meantime.

The RP-56 would have been a good choice, and I was looking at it a year ago, but it has no sizing/scaling/aspect features built in to the player. So I can't, for example, sidebox a 4:3 movie within the DVD player. This wouldn't be an issue for most people, but my television is an older model which locks into widescreen anamorphic mode whenever it's receiving a 480p signal. So I could never watch a 4:3 movie at the proper aspect ratio with that player unless I replaced my TV.

My ideal player would have been something like the RP56 (Something with DCDi), yet with the sizing/scaling/aspect features of the JVC players (which don't have DCDi). Don't know if one of those exists yet, I haven't looked at features this year, and the Hometheaterhifi guys don't have a shootout this year that I've seen.

Well, given my own experience, 480p isn't all it's cracked up to be.

And, honestly, if you asked me to do a double-blind test, it's not clear that I could tell you when my TV is in 480i vs. 480p mode, while the deinterlacer occasionally screws up in noticable juddering ways.

The correct answer, of course, is progressive DVD at 24fps. Once/if they standardize on a format like that, the players will start supporting it and doing the 3:2 pulldown or whatnot inside (and/or TVs will start supporting some multiple of 24fps as their raw input).

And, honestly, if you asked me to do a double-blind test, it's not clear that I could tell you when my TV is in 480i vs. 480p mode, while the deinterlacer occasionally screws up in noticable juddering ways.

You are describing a phenomena that they go into much detail on that very first link at the top of this thread. If your TV already deinterlaces (for instance, mine does), then the difference between the DVD's deinterlacer and your TV's deinterlacer will be subtle. They even go on to describe exactly what differences you might expect to see.

Resurrecting an old-ish thread...

So I'm now in the market for a progressive scan DVD player.

These guys (http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/main.html) did an update on their shootout and they most highly recommend the Panasonic DVD-RP82, which is no longer available.

They also are recommending the Panasonic XP-50, but that one doesn't have an RF Digital out for audio...

Any comments? Anyone know where I can get an RP82? I called EVERYWHERE.

- Jon

I've no idea where you can find any particular piece of gear, but I have an alternate theory for the misbehavior I was observing with my DVD player. Apparently, the latest and greatest primo, gourmet DVDs push the limits on the video bitrate. This gives great visual quality, but some DVD players can't keep up. This effect manifests itself in odd camera pans, where there's less useful information for the MPEG's motion compensation to compress the next video frame. As a result, the MPEG encoder (apparently) chooses to run at a higher bitrate. On such scenes, I'll see this jerky behavior. Then, I hit the skip-back button and watch it again with no flaws. Skip back again, and maybe there's a 30% chance of the flaw showing up.

Assuming this theory is correct, then it means that the 'progressive' business has nothing to do with the problem. This also turns out to be a great argument in favor of "home theater PCs" which can be build with 2x, 4x, or whatever higher-speed DVD drives.

The moral of the story, for me, is that when I buy my next DVD player, I'm taking Lord of the Rings along with me to see whether I can freak out the DVD player.

These guys (http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/main.html) did an update on their shootout

Ah, cool! I've been waiting for an update to this.

/me heads over there now.

Thanks!

As a result, the MPEG encoder (apparently) chooses to run at a higher bitrate.

It's not all that different than VBR mp3s, really. It's a good idea, in theory.