Interlacing is not interlacing, jaggies in VLC?
 

Hello all again,

I'm now working on a video for personal use only, a portion of which is a clip from Youtube (attached).

I cannot get the section to play in VLC or my Android devices without huge jaggies. I initially thought it was interlacing but whatever I try to deinterlace it (Handbrake, AVIdemux AVI to VDub) I cannot improve it. I strongly suspect that it is not interlaced (Mediainfo says not), but it looks like it to my untrained eye.

I would be grateful if the experts could tell me what's wrong with the clip and is there any way of fixing it.

The problem is best observed at the end, just as the aeroplane takes off and passes the camera (3m 45s 22f).

Thanks a lot, Al

It looks a bit like an interlaced video clip that has been scaled (and encoded) as progressive. If interlaced (weaved) video is scaled as though it was progressive there will no longer be alternating lines of each field, but something else depending on whatever the scaling algorithm does. Additionally, encoding an interlaced clip with 4:2:0 h.264 (the codec/format usually used for viewing and on yt these days) will mess with the weave pattern too, and it will mess up the chroma even more.

If you can't get the original somehow (from the uploader or elsewhere) you may be able to improve it a bit with some advanced avisynth trickery to divide the frames into fields manually and then deinterlace, but the video has already been messed up to a degree.

Even big producers seem to sometimes end up messing up youtube uploads in this way..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM

When you scale interlace, bad things happen. The clip was screwed up pre-Youtube.

I see this way too much from "professional" outlets (somebody non-professional was hired there), including not just Youtube, but broadcast TV. I've seen archived news clips on CNN, for example, that have so much damage that you really cannot see what's going on in the clip anymore. Maybe CNN did it, or maybe the source of the clip (news station) did it. But somebody up the chain screwed the clip up.

VirtuaDub has an area-based deinterlacer, but the outcome will only be less-bad, not good.

Thanks LS, which one is it? I might give it a crack. I'm using 32 bit VD.