On Sunday, I was looking at two different football games, one on CBS and the other on Fox. There was an absolutely HUGE difference in the quality of the picture, just backwards from the quality of the feed. Fox broadcasts their games in 1280x720 progressive while CBS broadcasts in 1920x1080 interlaced. I receive a nearly perfect signal from each station. The CBS feed looked fine during commercial breaks and anything else that was NOT football action but the football action was basically unwatchable, and I’m not referring to the teams but the video quality (Kansas City vs. Dallas). Meanwhile, a really unwatchable game from a football action standpoint but great from a video quality standpoint was the Arizona at Santa Clara game. It appears that the picture quality was related to the interlaced signal on CBS. This was on playback on my Amazon FireTV. Thankfully, I do have the “InstaTV” app on my Amazon FireTV and it handles interlacing much better. I was able to watch the Chiefs/Cowboys game using InstaTV, but lacked some of the DVR-like functions. Is there any way to improve the live transcoding of the interlaced video?
There are no settings in the app for that.
This is something that can be done with software but is cpu intensive, perhaps too much for the FireTv.
And yes this is definitely due to the interlaced stream.
I personally said screw it and bought an Nvidia Shield for my main TV as it plays everything perfectly including live interlaced streams.
@SiscoPlex said:
There are no settings in the app for that.
This is something that can be done with software but is cpu intensive, perhaps too much for the FireTv.And yes this is definitely due to the interlaced stream.
I personally said screw it and bought an Nvidia Shield for my main TV as it plays everything perfectly including live interlaced streams.
I don’t think this issue would have anything to do with the playback device. The trancoder is having to convert both streams. Unfortunately, 1080i is missing half of the video data. So what you’re seeing is the artifact of missing 50% of the fields. North America uses 30fps / 2 fields per frame progressive scan @720. Or… 30fps / 1 field per frame with alternating even / odd fields @1080. Watching something like a football game will reveal this to the point it’s tough to watch.
So what I’m saying is… There’s nothing that can be done about it…
Sorry about the tags! Wasn’t intentional!
@kd6icz said:
@SiscoPlex said:
There are no settings in the app for that.
This is something that can be done with software but is cpu intensive, perhaps too much for the FireTv.And yes this is definitely due to the interlaced stream.
I personally said screw it and bought an Nvidia Shield for my main TV as it plays everything perfectly including live interlaced streams.
I don’t think this issue would have anything to do with the playback device. The trancoder is having to convert both streams. Unfortunately, 1080i is missing half of the video data. So what you’re seeing is the artifact of missing 50% of the fields. North America uses 30fps / 2 fields per frame progressive scan @720. Or… 30fps / 1 field per frame with alternating even / odd fields @1080. Watching something like a football game will reveal this to the point it’s tough to watch.
So what I’m saying is… There’s nothing that can be done about it…
Sorry about the tags! Wasn’t intentional!
Of course there is something that can be done. Transcoder could use proper deinterlacer - like yadiff x2 which makes watching 1080i feeds smooth as butter.
Yes this is a major issue. I have been a big proponent of proper de-interlacing for a long time now. This has always been a week spot for Plex but with many more people using BluRay vs DVD source material the problem was mostly masked. Plex to the best of my knowledge has never really handled de-interlacing optimally in the clients or when transcoding. Often times in the past, even the meta-data that was scanned from your files was wrong.
But now with DVR and LiveTV, interlaced video is back in full force front and center. Different parts of the world broadcast differently but generally speaking in the USA only 720 broadcasts are progressive with SD and 1080 being interlaced.
Plex has been addressing this bit by bit. Right now the recommendation I would make for any sports fans is to use a ShieldTV or PMP2 on Windows (not embedded or Linux). With either of these two devices/clients you can get de-interlacing as you would more or less expect.
This is a pet-peave of mine as I’m a big, no HUGE fan of sports (all kinds) and watch at least a dozen matches/games a week (on a bad week!). Ideally, Plex should add a new option to the DVR setup menu which is Transcode & De-Interlace. This would replace the current Transcode which is rather stupid. The current option will transcode everything without de-interlacing. So if you record on Fox which is already 720p you reprocess something that isn’t needed. With the new setting it would Transcode MPEG2 to H.264 (not 720p) and would de-interlace (Yadiff) anything that’s interlaced while also converting to H.264 if needed. In a nutshell a smarter Transcode that will give smooth playback. So you then could decide to record RAW or get progressive H.264 which is ideal for storage.
The other way to solve this is for interlaced content to automatically be de-interlaced when transcoding.
This is bugging me so much I’m thinking of writing a proxy for my HDHomeRuns that will sit in the middle of Plex and the network tuners and do exactly what I just mentioned. Plex would then only get H.264 streams that are already properly de-interlaced. The only reason I haven’t done this yet is that I do use PMP2 or ShieldTV when watching sports so I’ve worked around it.
Carlo
I agree @cayars on all points you described.
I also use shields and PMP2. On my fire TV’s when watching local(which is pretty much the only interlaced streams) I use Kodi with the nextPVR addon for live sports.
Me Footie channels are not interlaced! 
@cayars said:
Plex has been addressing this bit by bit. Right now the recommendation I would make for any sports fans is to use a ShieldTV or PMP2 on Windows (not embedded or Linux). With either of these two devices/clients you can get de-interlacing as you would more or less expect.
Dont forget OpenPHT, which plays all recordings natively and has best deinterlacer for sports (yadiff x2 on Windows it’s called DXVA - Best)
I have been using livetv for about 3 days, watched some college football today just to test and didn’t see this problem here. I’m in the Milwaukee tv area and using a Hauppauge QuadHD pci card, windows plex server, with 2017 roku’s. I have 14 different OTA channels and haven’t see any artifacts or interlacing. But then again maybe it was just the way they were broadcasting the mpeg stream for that particular game you watched is not something I’ve seen yet.
Was it 720 or 1080?
Hi
here in the uk we have the same issue freeview HD streames are broadcast 1080i, i thought i left this issue years ago as we had it on windows mce for a while, i like plex its works well and cant wait for a proper guide so i can bin mce, here are my findings on interlaced
live or recorded tv is the same
Amazon fire TV, cannot play sports, issue with interlaced unwatchable, end up watching on catchup TV
the same file plays fine on the plex server windows 8 MCE,Jriver, now plex server
just tried a pi2 with latest rasplex and it plays the same content without any issues, stunning picture quality as well, better than fireTV
im looking for a plex client that will be reliable and easy to use (WAF), fireTV is a great option as it had kodi, all the catchup prime as a subscriber and plex all the eggs in one basket it is almost perfect what needs to be done to make this perfect.
also whats the best ultraHD player to use,
Best bang for the buck will be the ShieldTV 16GB version (as long as you don’t want to use it as a server as well).
You can roll your own single purpose devices but having a Plex player with other apps like LiveView, Kodi, ESPN, HULU, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc available makes it a great choice.
Basically handles all you audio needs, 4K if you have it and direct plays nearly all file types without transcoding including LiveTV. NFL viewing of 1080i broadcasts are just as good as them playing direct on the TV via set top box so no interlacing issues. ShieldTV has built in HW transcoding that can be used by the plex server (if running on the same box) or can easily do only decoding which makes it easily to de-interlace when needed.
Downside it costs 2 times more than many other devices but well worth the cost in my book for ease of use and functionality. It’s also very quick.
