Been a long while, is there any chance of proper deinterlacing support for native field-interlaced content? The Infuse/ATV combo does not support this at present, so e.g. native 50i has jerky/low-res quality regardless of the deinterlacing options that I pick, as the full 50Hz motion is not reproduced. I enjoy Infuse but to have this feature missing when it’s available on so many other platforms is really disappointing.
Posting this under an explicit thread title in terms of what would be great to add to Infuse on the ATV platform. It’s discussed in the thread linked below. None of the deinterlacing modes provided with Infuse support the full temporal resolution for native interlaced content such as field-interlaced 50i (I have a lot of content in this format). This isn’t a limitation of the hardware, the MrMC app includes a “bob - inverted” deinterlaced mode which produces perfect playback on the mkvs for my native 50i content. Judging by the limited number of posts on this subject I guess it’s not a big deal for many Infuse users, but it would be great to hear whether a bob-deinterlace mode will ever be added to Infuse. Otherwise native 50i is unwatchable as all the current modes are rendering the output as a nasty blend of the fields, leading to stuttery motion and degraded resolution. Infuse is fine for content such as 1080i/25, where the 50 fields per second comprise 25 full frames, but not for 50i content where each field is separated in time, and so all the 50Hz fluidity of the original video is lost.
I can work around this as I have access to other platforms that handle interlaced video correctly (Infuse is a bit of an outlier in not having a bob deinterlace mode), but I just introduced someone to Infuse who relies on the ATV for non-disc playback, and at present he can’t use Influse for the field-interlaced 50i content in his library.
Any chance this can be addressed?
Any progress on Infuse being able to play 50i/60i content properly. I can attest that this is being done very well in the Channels DVR app so I know the deinterlace bob effect is possible on Apple TV. I have lots of files shot interlaced that I would love to be able to play through Infuse in their native format without having to transcode using something like Handbrake, introducing further degradation of the original file. Thank you!!
Great to see another post on this, and to see the “Planned” status for adding support for fully interlaced content.
Just to add my 2 cents: I also experience the above mentioned judder. I bought some old TV Shows on DVD and the remuxed file is not properly interlaced. 
looking forward to a proper implementation of this.
This is an endless story? I’ve read through numerous comments, and for 4-5 years we’ve been asking for the yadif2x or w3fdif option for deinterlacing. Is there a promise regarding this?
This feature is currently tagged as planned so it’s being looked at but there’s no ETA for this feature.
You can see what each tag means here.
As to this…
While it’s been a long time the number of supporters for the first post is not very many so that may factor into when it gets addressed.
Any chance of this being addressed at some point?
Am I wrong that it is literally just changing a flag in the yadif settings to allow deinterlacing to 50hz or 59.94hz?
I just don’t like the way motion looks with half the framerate tossed for interlaced content (yeah that’s an oversimplification but you hopefully know what I mean).
Currently switching to kodi running on an nvidia shield any time I watch anything interlaced, would rather just watch in infuse instead.
It really should be addressed, regardless of how (relatively) few users complain about it, because a significant percentage of certain types of video content (concerts, sports) is affected. By the way, here’s another suggestion thread looking for a solution to the same problem. The abandoned and half-broken MrMC seems to be the only app on the platform that handles these videos correctly.
I think you’re right in the fact that it should be just a change of a flag of how de-interlacing is handled by Infuse. The work has already been done to implement YADIF2x interlacing natively to Apple’s Metal graphics API by the Channels app developers, as stated here: Add YADIF (2x) deinterlacing - #16 by fancybits
I’ll add my voice to this.
I have a lot of interlaced MPEG content on my server and am frustrated at how Infuse plays it back. For years.
Selecting any of the deinterlacing modes in Infuse results, to my eye, in slightly blurry video with noticeably jerkier motion.
Turning deinterlacing off in Infuse doesn’t work either. My TV does not recognise the output as interlaced, and so shows the interlacing combing artefacts, as if each frame is progressive.
But if I play the same video content via my Beyonwiz, for example, my TV recognises the video is interlaced and so effectively doubles the frame rate, and plays each field as a frame - 25i turns into 50p. It looks brilliant - no interlacing artefacts, and very smooth moton!
So my question is - is this an Infuse issue or Apple TV issue?
If delinterlacing is turned off in Infuse, is it not being properly flagged to the Apple TV as being interlaced video? And so in turn the TV doesn’t know it either, and plays 25i as if it were 25p?
Or is this an Apple TV issue, and the Apple TV is not respecting the interlacing flags produced by Infuse, and sending all output on HDMI as progressive?
@james - are you able to advise? Thanks.
I haven’t updated to Infuse 8 yet, I was hoping proper frame doubling deinterlacing would finally be supported.
Better handling of interlaced content is the only real playback feature that Infuse is lacking, and it is an odd omission since there is so much interlaced content in existence.
I still switch over to Kodi on an nvidia shield just to watch interlaced content since it all looks terrible to my eyes via Infuse.
Since this thread goes back over 5 years it isn’t looking good?! Maybe Infuse 9 could add it?
No change in Infuse 8. Note this feature request is tagged as “Planned” at the top. So no need to regularly ask if the feature is implemented or not yet - when it is, this thread will no longer say “Planned” at the top.
My post was to add my voice to the request that this feature be implemented, and also to ask @james a question as to where this issue lies - in Infuse, or Apple TV (or conceivably both).
My understanding is that Apple TV hardware decoders don’t support any form of deinterlacing (happy to be corrected on this), so it must be done at a software decoding level.
So I guess the issue lies with both Apple and Infuse.
I still use the abandoned MrMC on Apple TV for this kind of content.
If ATV hardware decoders don’t support any deinterlacing, an alternative would be for Infuse to directly pass-through interlaced content to the HDMI port, and let the TV display do the deinterlacing.
But that would work only if Apple’s HDMI implementation allows interlace pass-through.
I’m not sure if it does, because turning deinterlacing off in Infuse results in my TV displaying combed interlaced content as if it were progressive.
That could be an ATV issue, or it could be an Infuse issue, hence my question to @james .
@rockdewey Thanks, I picked up a copy.
It is much, much (did I say much?) less polished than the recent versions of kodi but it is functional for watching interlaced content and will allow me to not have to switch to another device to do so.
It’s an Infuse problem at this stage, as proper de-interlacing for Metal devices such as the Apple TV 4K has been a part of FFmpeg since late 2021, which is what Infuse heavily relies on for their playback engine (see here: What player does Infuse use? - #3 by james). As a result, as far as I’m aware it’s a matter of waiting for this Metal-specific implementation of the YADIF2x de-interlacer, which de-interlaces 50i/60i content properly, to be added to Infuse.
Thanks @nciano01 for that very helpful explanation of where the issue lies and what is needed to fix it.
It seems this feature is “Planned” by Firecore so it’s just a question of priority and time.
Well, I got tired of waiting for Infuse to fix this, so I rather laboriously went through my content and used ffmpeg’s bwdif deinterlacing filter to convert 50 field per second interlaced material to 50 frame per second progressive, then re-uploaded that to my server.
I can report that Apple TV plays back 50 fps progressive content fine. And it looks SOOOOO much better than the blurry deinterlacing that Infuse dishes out.
It didn’t have to be this way… but that’s where we are.