Live TV on Shield - Poor 1080i deinterlacing

General Discussions Plex Features
1

Just put on the Stanley Cup finals
game on NBC HD (1080i source). The picture was pretty awful in full motion shots. It appears that Plex is deinterlacing to 1080p30 and passing that out. Not good with fast motion.

I have Adjust Refresh rate on as I watch a fair number of movies. I disabled this and it cleared up the motion issues as it seems that the shield then did the conversion to 1080p60. Same result when using Live Channels on my HDHR prime source–buttery smooth.

Suggestion to Plex:

  1. Convert 1080i60 to 1080p60 rather than 1080p30
  2. Allow refresh rate switch to be disabled for Live TV.

Maybe there’s another answer to this, and would love suggestions. As it stands, Plex Live TV not a good source for sports watching without disabling otherwise very useful setting.

2

I noticed the same. Odd, because SPMC on the Shield, if using mediacodec surface, does seem to use a doubler deinterlacer and it results in a beautiful picture. I figured Plex would use the same decoder…

3

I recorded the same game last night and looked at it with both SPMC and Plex (refresh rate switching on and off). I actually couldn’t tell a difference between the 3. The switching to 60fps (instead of keeping it at 59.94) is wrong, but it seems the deinterlacing is of the same quality to my eye.

4

Hmm. I also had recorded this game after I saw the above symptoms. Watching the recording also looks poor with adjust refresh rate on in Plex. However, watching the same file with Kodi 17.3 with adjust refresh rate was silky smooth.

This has to be the deinterlacing down to 30 fps rather than the doubling to 60 fps. Seems like this a logic being employed in Plex that is different than Kodi which leaves it at 60 fps. Plex should adjust.

5

I’ve played around more with this now that Shield 5.2 has released. Any 1080i source with any kind of speed, the drop in frame rate to 30fps is very noticiable. For example, you can see smearing on NFL HD on the news scroll at bottom.

This should be a simple fix, simply take 1080i60 and push out 1080p. Not needed for your typical Law & Order SVU or other thing, but makes a huge difference in quality of sports viewing.

I’m still somewhat new to Plex as had been a longtime Kodi user. What’s the most effective way to get this change request / bug fix in front of the Plex Team?

Thanks.