DVD Forum Getting Ready For DVD 2.0

[vazel]

Why do you people keep saying DVDs are interlaced? I've encoded DVD movies to x264 and all of them were 23.976fps progressive. Some of them were hybrid(some scenes are interlaced). All the extras for those movies I've worked with have been interlaced however. I don't know what tv show DVDs usually are but I'm assuming they're interlaced.

Wiki for DVD telecine

In the soft-telecined case, the material is stored on the DVD at the film rate (24 or 23.976 frames/s) in the original progressive format, with special flags inserted into the MPEG-2 video stream that instruct the DVD player to repeat certain fields so as to accomplish the required pulldown during playback.[7] Progressive scan DVD players additionally offer output at 480p by using these flags to duplicate frames rather than fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine#DVDs

And a thread about 23.976fps progressive DVD movies at doom9.

 

[Zaphod]

Although technically DVD only supports interlaced video, films are transformed into interlaced through telecine, therefore an inverse telecine process can easily convert it back into progressive video. This is already done by many newer DVD players, and also by most computer based DVD player programs.

I'm guessing they're going for extensions to make use of that fact and the fact that most DVD sources are encoded as progressive frames anyway. Unlike the 'progressive' flag already in spec, if they could augment it with a reliable indicator of the source material and the encode (hi, I'm a 24p movie) then scaling and display rate conversion could be much easier on the TVs of today (by cutting out the unnecessary and potentially error-introducing steps in between) and the 'legacy' interlaced transport wouldn't be affected.

 

[N00b]

Although technically DVD only supports interlaced video

Nonsense. The specification does not specify that video has to be interlaced, see here. MPEG-2 (Main Profile @ Main Level) allows both interlaced and progressive frames.

 

[pcchen]

I'm guessing they're going for extensions to make use of that fact and the fact that most DVD sources are encoded as progressive frames anyway. Unlike the 'progressive' flag already in spec, if they could augment it with a reliable indicator of the source material and the encode (hi, I'm a 24p movie) then scaling and display rate conversion could be much easier on the TVs of today (by cutting out the unnecessary and potentially error-introducing steps in between) and the 'legacy' interlaced transport wouldn't be affected.

Actually, you can already do that in MPEG-2 specification, and I think most DVD are encoded this way (except those very badly encoded ones). Basically the video is encoded in progressive frames, and the pulldown flags specify how the video should be played, interlaced. A DVD player which can correctly recognize these flags can produce perfect progressive results. Although, technically this is a post processing. The video is still intended to be played interlaced. The flags serve as a measure to increase efficiency only (after telecine there are many fields with same contents, and it's wise to avoid encoding the same field twice).

 

[pcchen]

Nonsense. The specification does not specify that video has to be interlaced, see here. MPEG-2 (Main Profile @ Main Level) allows both interlaced and progressive frames.

It does. Without proper telecine process, a 24 fps MPEG-2 video can't be accepted into a (proper) DVD authoring tool, since "progressive_sequence" is not supported by DVD-Video.

 

[MfA]

Who knows. Maybe DVD2 will be dual-layer with VC-1 encoded HD video on the second layer.

You mean a little like a dual format HD-DVD? This is obviously not going to happen.