Originally posted by: Mentasm
So basically, does that mean that all progressive film sourced material is encoded as interlaced field pairs to save on space, then flags tell the player to repeat fields to allow for playback on interlaced displays? Presumably when the progressive flag is set (as it should be for film sourced material) the player realises that the fields come from the same frame and ignores the 2-3 sequence, thereby reconstructing the progressive frame?
So basically, does that mean that all progressive film sourced material is encoded as interlaced field pairs to save on space, then flags tell the player to repeat fields to allow for playback on interlaced displays? Presumably when the progressive flag is set (as it should be for film sourced material) the player realises that the fields come from the same frame and ignores the 2-3 sequence, thereby reconstructing the progressive frame?
I've found a great site that explains all of this pretty well. It basically says (if I understood correctly) that there are various ways that a DVD can be encoded- and it boils down to how well your particular DVD player de-interlaces the particular material/information on the DVD, in order to make it progressive. Some DVD players just use flags, others (the better ones) can detect the correct de-interlacing algorithim to use based on the motion in the frame ("motion-adaptive").
Full article here:
LINK
They also review a ton of different DVD players, and grade them on how well they de-interlace various types of DVDs (with various 'cadences', etc.)
Maybe they just had a crappy de-interlacer at Comic-Con? I guess well find out soon enough.