[spathi]

Hi All,

I have a 17" PB with 1 gig of ram running 10.2.6.

On the odd occasion lines seem to appear while watching some DVDs. It usually happens when there is movement, kind of like something isnt refreshing fast enough?

I tried using DVD Backup, forty-two & osex to make backups to the hdd and play them that way, but the lines are still there?

It's only happened on a few dvds (mainly TV series), but its quite annoying.

has anyone else experiences this? any solutions?

Thanks for your time

[a2daj]

Meet Mr. Interlacing. Those lines usually show up in DVDs where the video source was interlaced, such as TV shows. Most notably animated shows that haven't been digitally remastered (ie, most of my anime collection). There are many low quality DVD movies which also show the "feathering" effect you see. A lot of the times that happens due to the conversion from ~24fps to ~30fps.

For more information, a Google search would be your friend. NVIDIA has an FAQ that covers it:
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=3593#video_b2

Here's another link:
http://www.lukesvideo.com/interlacing.html


The ATI Radeon drivers use to have a feature called Adaptive Deinterlacing which, for the most part removed the feathering. However, due to Quartz Extreme, the hardware AD is no longer available. NVIDIA chipsets, like the one in your PB never had this option.

You could try playing the DVDs with VLC, but I'm not sure how well the deinterlacing options work and it VLC doesn't work well with DVD menus.

[JohnM15141]

I've also noticed those same lines occasionally while watching DVD's on my 17PB.

The other day I had my PB hooked up to a Hotel TV. I have my desktop set to change backgrounds every few minutes. The lines in the video only occured when the Desktop Background changed.

As long as no other operations take place my video plays back flawlessly.

OS X has lots of little background tasks that take place, especially if your on a network. Find out if something is running and get it to stop while playing DVD's would do the trick.

It seems to me that the Apple DVD player doesn't own enough of the CPU Resources to Play DVD's with disruption.

[spathi]

a2daj - Thanks for those links, I read all the info and it was very useful I had a feeling it could be an interlacing thing (as thats what it looks like!) but i was just worried i might have a slightly dodgey superdrive!

I've gone through most of my dvds, and found the ones that have this problem (i've found many people refer to it as "combing"). I've ripped em, and encoded them with the deinterlace option in ffmpegX and this fixes them right up. and as they are all tv series they arnt to big once divx'ed

Thanks once again I can now watch black books on my PB (Black Books is a british comedy, very funny IMO, i urge people to check it out! )