Watching an interlaced DVD with MPlayer

Resuming my tech-notes blogging…

I’ve recently bought three Studio Ghibli’s movies. I don’t have a TV-set (yes, lenina, I’m still not watching any TV), so I’m watching DVDs on my laptop. DVDs I got are interlaced, when watching them on a computer, you can see small horizontal stripes along the sides of moving objects.

On a TV-set, this is not a problem, actually, interlacing makes animation on TV-set smoother. But on a computer, all you get from interlacing is stripes.

MPlayer comes with few deinterlacing plugins, from which yadif and kerndeint seem to work best (but I’m open to other suggestions). However, my video output is GL:

maciej@clover ~ $ cat .mplayer/config
vo = gl
autosync = 20
monitorpixelaspect = 1
af = volnorm=2:0.6
ao = pulse

The problem with those deinterlace filters is that they don’t cooperate with the gl video output. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for that: append scale filter.

mplayer -vobsubid 1 -vf kerndeint,scale dvd://5

Replace 5 with your title number. The vobsubid option tells MPlayer to display subtitles. I like to watch Japanese movies with the original soundtrack and English subtitles. Usually, English dubbing reveals too much about the characters and lacks the original expression.

Models illuminate our ignorance

This video-clip is about the Matrix movie, but it can be as well about the data analysis and statistical modeling.

Spin

Have you seen the short (8 minutes) film “Spin” from Double Edge Films? You can watch it on-line, or find it as a part of a German television program about the Open-Source and Creative Commons licensed movies. It’s also available in Google Video, but at least on my computer video and audio go out of sync, what effectively destroys the expression of the sound and image. The television program has the best quality. Spin begins in about 24 minutes 30 seconds of the program.

Maybe I’m biased with this, but the Spin’s story is much like software development and bugfixing. I couldn’t think of it any other way that the DJ is a programmer, the city is a program and all the wrong events are software bugs.