Placeshifter Deinterlace?

[perholm]

Hi,

I have a SageTV server and a Placeshifter running on identical machines. I'm placeshifting at about 2 Mbps, at 704x480.

Deinterlace is working perfectly directly on the server, and I'm getting extremely smooth playback. But on the placeshifted machine, exact same hardware, I'm getting interlace-lines, which looks really crummy when there's motion.

I'd like to know if anyone knows how I can control how the placeshifted video gets decoded. Since Placeshifter offers the option of full 480i playback, I don't understand why you're not presented with all the same options for which video renderer should be used, DScaler etc. on the Placeshifter machine.

Am I doomed to have crummy interlaced full resolution playback on the Placeshifter machine? This is the same on all machines I test on. Looks perfect on the server. Is terribly interlaced on Placeshifter machines.

Thanks,

Per

[perholm]

Hi again,

I finally figured out how to do it, and I think it's CRAZY that this isn't built into Placeshifter. Developers, you really have to do this unless it's on purpose that you want the picture to be worse in Placeshift than in Client.

Anyway, some of this is probably obvious to others in here, but news to me.

Placeshifter runs a program called SageTVPlayer.exe in the Placeshifter directory, and this is really an MPlayer in disguise, so it responds to MPlayer config files.

So inside the Placeshifter directory, create a new directory called "mplayer", and in that, place a text file called "config" -- no extension -- and inside it, write:

vo=directx
vf=pp=fd

The first line might be redundant, as directx might be the default renderer, but the second line triggers the ffdmpeg deinterlacer, which very much appears to do double-frame-rate deinterlacing (=smooth motion).

I'm satisfied, this is good enough for me.

The developers should REALLY build this in right away, unless it's a deliberate sabotage. The picture looks WAY better.

Best,

Per

[Mucaro]

I'm having the same problem here. Thanks for sharing the solution. I'll try that ASAP.

[w84no1]

Thanks for the tip. That helped me get a better picture even when I am at work watching over the internet.

[perholm]

HA, I may finally have figured it out. I took one last trip through trying all the MPlayer deinterlacer settings, I must have missed this one:

vf=yadif=1:0

This deinterlaces and doubles the frame-rate, and it displays nearly smoothly. News tickers now actually update at 60 fields per second.

To anyone else who is struggling with this, do the following.

Inside the Placeshifter directory, create the folder/file "mplayer/config" (no extension), and inside that file, paste:

vo=directx
vf=yadif=1:0

Try that out for size!

Per

[voidpt]

Thanks for the tip. Makes it look very good.

Don't really think the developers try to criple at purpose. They already have the [v] Enable Video Port Processing checkbox in Settings. This adds -vf pp7 on command line to MPlayer (SageTVPlayer).

So, best thing would probably be to send a request through this link and ask if they can make a new option in Settings that would give yadif=1:0, or similar.

[perholm]

Hi,

Great! I've tested on many machines, many different video cards and processors, and playback is better everywhere.

By the way, I can see you're in Norway. The last parameter changes the field dominance, so you may have to do vf=yadif=1:1 in a PAL country.

Cheers,

Per

[voidpt]

Thanks again And yeah, I'm in a 25/50i/PAL location. Will experiment more this weekend and try to find some suitable material with much movement to judge the effect of parameters.

[reggie14]

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I tried adding those lines into a config file and I didn't see any change (and it maybe made things slightly worse). I didn't notice any change when I had the resolution locked in at CIF. I think it looks half way decent anway though. The D1 resolution has always looked bad- the deinterlacing is horrible. I figured adding those lines would fix that, but I don't think it did anything.

I'm probably using an old version of placeshifter, so that might be part of it. I noticed my SageTVPlayer says its file version 0.0.9.0 of mplayer.

[perholm]

Did you create a directory called "mplayer" inside the Placeshifter directory, and inside that place a file called "config" (no extension), containing this text?

Best,

Per

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by perholm

Did you create a directory called "mplayer" inside the Placeshifter directory, and inside that place a file called "config" (no extension), containing this text?

Yep, I did that. Sorry, I could have been more explicit. And I'm pretty sure I didn't screw that part up. I noticed after creating the mplayer directory that Sage/mplayer would automatically generate a blank config file (this happened when I temporarily changed the config file's name so it wouldn't be used). Of course, it didn't create one (or overwrite the old one) when my config file was there. So, I know Sage/mplayer saw that config file and, presumably, used it.

[perholm]

Then I'm stumped. You obviously have the right directory.

Are you streaming in D1 quality, or the lower resolution? If you're streaming in the lower resolution, it's already deinterlaced as part of the resize and you wouldn't benefit.

Best,

Per

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by perholm

Are you streaming in D1 quality, or the lower resolution? If you're streaming in the lower resolution, it's already deinterlaced as part of the resize and you wouldn't benefit.

I guessed that was why CIF wasn't giving me problems. When I get home tonight I'll try using the most recent version of the placeshifter, which probably has an updated version of mplayer. It's sort of a non-issue for me, since in practice I don't really have the bandwidth required for D1, but I'm interested in trying to get deinterlacing working. D1 is pretty unwatchable now. The Sage server should probably automatically deinterlace when its doing the encoding.

[reggie14]

Since your other thread was closed, I'll post this here because I'm know you're watching it. For the record, I don't think placeshifter was intentionally crippled, it's just that the placeshifter is limited by its architecture. But, I think it does have some problems and missing features. I think some of the problems you're experiencing are oversights on Sage's part (I think deinterlacing falls in this category), and some are probably because you're using the placeshifter a little differently than it was originally intended.

So, I recommend that you start another thread where we can discuss feature requests. After a while, you could pass them on to Sage and maybe they'll implement some or all of them. It seems like they really ought to do something about deinterlacing and they should probably have a way of remembering log-in credentials.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by perholm

Then I'm stumped. You obviously have the right directory.

I messed around with placeshifter for a while tonight. I think what was going on is that I had post-processing turned on in placeshifter. That over-road the settings in the config file (apparently), because once I turned that off I definitely noticed a big difference.

But, it makes we wonder what if I want the post-processing? Apparently turning on post processing enables the pp7 filter. How do I enable deinterlacing and the pp7 filter in the config file?

[perholm]

Hi there,

The manual for MPlayer command line arguments is at:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html

I'm not an expert by any stretch, but for pp, the syntax presumably would be:

vf=pp=...

Where ... is your stuff -- so the syntax is slightly different in the config file than if you were passing command line arguments.

But pp probably will fight with the deinterlacer, at least for processing time. Maybe it's a better idea to manually enable various de-blocking filters and micromanage their settings.

Cheers,

Per