Interlacing and telecine in Gstreamer

Interlacing and telecine, Robert Swain, Collabora

Robert Swain is a multimedia software developer with a strong and long-running interest in codecs and processing/transformation of digital audio and video. He learned to program on-the-fly while contributing to open source multimedia software projects including FFmpeg/libav and GStreamer.

Since joining Collabora in 2009, he has worked on a broad range of topics such as GStreamer as a multimedia backend for Android, progressive download support for common video formats, PiTiVi pipeline optimisations, general camera improvements for Meego and dynamic, automated deinterlacing.

Talk Abstract

Legacy quirks of the audiovisual media industry often plague digital video content some time after they should really have been phased out - telecine/interlacing are among them and still pose problems in our modern and progressive world.

Interlacing and telecine still have some merit today, e.g. sports benefit from higher temporal resolution provided by interlacing, but we all have progressive displays that want progressive frames to display.

A goal was set to develop a solution within GStreamer to obtain progressive video content from any video input. Therefore it was required to implement identification of source content, interpolation or reconstruction of progressive frames and all the surrounding magic to make things 'just work'.

The background, proposed solutions and interesting bits and pieces will be discussed in this talk.