If you have ever watched any interlaced video, you might found that watching interlaced video on LCD is not funny at all. There are too many lines periodically appearing on screen and you have to watch them line by line. So it would be better to deinterlace them to watch smooth frames. Since I usually play video files in Mplayer, I will show you how to deinterlace in Mplayer.

Interlaced video cannot be reversed the operation at 100% quality so there are so many algorithms to deinterlace and you have you choose the right one for you. In Mplayer, you are able to obtain all possible options using option -pphelp.

sugree@sugree-laptop:~$ mplayer -pphelp
MPlayer dev-SVN-r22191-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz (Family: 6, Model: 13, Stepping: 8)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
Available postprocessing filters:
Filters                        Options
short  long name       short   long option     Description
*      *               a       autoq           CPU power dependent enabler
                       c       chrom           chrominance filtering enabled
                       y       nochrom         chrominance filtering disabled
                       n       noluma          luma filtering disabled
hb     hdeblock        (2 threshold)           horizontal deblocking filter
       1. difference factor: default=32, higher -> more deblocking
       2. flatness threshold: default=39, lower -> more deblocking
                       the h & v deblocking filters share these
                       so you can't set different thresholds for h / v
vb     vdeblock        (2 threshold)           vertical deblocking filter
ha     hadeblock       (2 threshold)           horizontal deblocking filter
va     vadeblock       (2 threshold)           vertical deblocking filter
h1     x1hdeblock                              experimental h deblock filter 1
v1     x1vdeblock                              experimental v deblock filter 1
dr     dering                                  deringing filter
al     autolevels                              automatic brightness / contrast
                       f        fullyrange     stretch luminance to (0..255)
lb     linblenddeint                           linear blend deinterlacer
li     linipoldeint                            linear interpolating deinterlace
ci     cubicipoldeint                          cubic interpolating deinterlacer
md     mediandeint                             median deinterlacer
fd     ffmpegdeint                             ffmpeg deinterlacer
l5     lowpass5                                FIR lowpass deinterlacer
de     default                                 hb:a,vb:a,dr:a
fa     fast                                    h1:a,v1:a,dr:a
ac                                             ha:a:128:7,va:a,dr:a
tn     tmpnoise        (3 threshold)           temporal noise reducer
                     1. <= 2. <= 3.            larger -> stronger filtering
fq     forceQuant                   force quantizer
Usage:
[:...][[,|/][-]...]...
long form example:
vdeblock:autoq/hdeblock:autoq/linblenddeint    default,-vdeblock
short form example:
vb:a/hb:a/lb                                   de,-vb
more examples:
tn:64:128:256
 
107 audio & 227 video codecs

For example, lb should produce acceptable video.

mplayer -vf pp=lb interlaced-video.avi

You may find more information at TLDP.

Tags: mplayer, interlaced, deinterlace