GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 703739
deinterlace: flickering with some DVDs
Last modified: 2018-11-03 14:49:00 UTC
Playing DVDs gives a flickering video. I have tested now "Zeitakademmie: Psychologie" and "The good wife season 3". Test were done in Fedora 18 and 19. The quality was ok in Fedora 17. Especially a line from the upper left corner until the middle of the screen is always flickering. There is a lot of output like this: /GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstInputSelector:inputselector2.GstSelectorPad:sink_0: tags = "taglist\,\ title\=\(string\)THE_GOOD_WIFE_S3_D4\,\ video-codec\=\(string\)\"MPEG\\\ 2\\\ Video\"\,\ minimum-bitrate\=\(uint\)91200\,\ bitrate\=\(uint\)6363409\,\ maximum-bitrate\=\(uint\)15404000\;"
Created attachment 248548 [details] GST_DEBUG=*:5 gst-launch-1.0 -v playbin uri=dvd:// 2> gw3.log
I want to add: there is no such issue in gstreamer-0.10 which Totem was using in Fedora 17. So this gst-launch-0.10 playbin2 uri=dvd:// runs OK.
Could you please test gst-launch-1.0 vs. gst-launch-0.10 on the same Fedora version? Also, why did you file this bug against totem if the issue happens with just gst-launch as well?
I did both tests on Fedora 19. Also I can confirm to you that it behaved the same with Fedora 18. I filed it against totem because that was my purpose of usage. I want to have a working totem with DVD playback again. The last version which was working was Fedora 17 with gstreamer-0.10. It is not clear to me why totem changed to gstreamer1 since this version is not working correctly. I changed using to Fluendo player now. This is using gstreamer-0.10 and this is working.
I also openend a case here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=904792
I'm not sure what the problem is exactly (hard to tell what kind of flickering it is without seeing it), but I doubt it's a general 0.10 vs 1.0 thing. There is no reason for this to depend on the GStreamer version, it's likely something to do with the graphics output chosen, and maybe the graphics backend. It generally seems to work fine for most people as far as I am aware. Maybe what you're seeing is "tearing" ? Is it mostly obvious in scenes with movements? Does it go away if you remove the fluendo codec pack? (Does "gst-inspect-1.0 | grep -i flu" show anything?)
Look: I did a fresh Fedora 19 installation without installation of Fluendo codec pack so far. Also this is not the same PC as the one for which I opened the bug in RedHat bugzilla. My old PC had an NVidia graphic card (9500 as far as I remember) and my new one has some integraed Intel board. The difference between gst-0.10 and gst-1.0 is exactly the same on both systems. So I don't believe that it has anything to do with my grahic drivers or Fluendo. I also checked my monitor settings (I have a SyncMaster 2494) but did not find anything to better the situation. Also a reset on the monitor settings did not change the behaviour. My graphic driver is i915. With flickering I mean that the picture is not stable. Espcecially a line at the top and botton (perhaps 3 mm heigth) is moving quickly in up and down. I tested again today and the result is as always. Everything is fine with gst-launch-0.10 and the flickering with gst-launch-1.0. The effect is also good visible when only text appears on the screen so it has nothing to do with quick movements.
I will show you want I mean with flickering. I filmed some seconds of a DVD with my digicam. For this I ran totem in full screen mode. Please go to this site. You will find an flv file there. Then you can see it yourself. http://www.frank-ansari.de/debug/
Let me point out that not only the first lines are flickering. You can see it especially when text is on the screen. I put a second example on the location given above with a presentation on psychology. You will find flickering of text in the middle of the screen. You can also see that the bottom is also flickering. Since all installations of gstreamer-1 I did so far have this flickering (which I never saw in gstreamer-0.10) I conclude it will have all the same reason. Any hinte what I am doing wrong?
I doubt you're doing anything wrong, I'm sure it's a bug somewhere. Could you try (in F19 preferably): gst-launch-1.0 playbin flags="soft-colorbalance+soft-volume+text+audio+video" uri=dvd:// (i.e. with deinterlacing disabled), to see if that makes a difference?
Yes! This makes a big difference. The flickering is gone. It is now as good as with gstreamer-0.10. How can I apply these settings to the totem player?
I found the settings for totem. It is what you said: there is a property setting for deinterlacing. When I deactivate it the flickering is gone. I cannot remember I activated it. I guess this is default. So I conclude that default settings give flickering on my system with gstreamer-1.0.
Maybe related to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617778 There's some tearing as well but the flickering first line looks like a bug in the deinterlacer. Can you make a short section of the movie available for testing? Setting a different value for the tff or fields property of deinterlace might be able to give better directions to where exactly the bug is.
What do you mean "make a short section of the movie available for testing"? The behaviour is not dependend on a specific DVD. You can take any DVD for your tests. Most DVDs have some text like FSK. Especially there you will see the flickering. Also at top and bottom - especially on the left hand side. Also I don't know how to set tff and field properties in totem. In properties I can activate or deactivate deinterlacing.
I wasn't able to reproduce it with two DVDs I tried here, both having interlaced video content. So it's likely something specific to the DVDs you tried. You'd have to build a custom pipeline for this, e.g. gst-launch-1.0 -v rsndvdbin device=/dev/dvd ! deinterlace mode=interlaced fields=all tff=tff ! videoconvert ! navseek ! xvimagesink You could also try if any of the different methods on deinterlace makes a difference.
Strange. I never had a DVD which worked with gstreamer-1.0 before I deactivated the deinterlacing in totem. I tried the command given above but this gives again flickering.
Try the command above with different properties. Like tff=bff or fields=top or fields=bottom
The video in bug #687684 seems to exhibit something like this (e.g. if you look at the '#isaac' or the 'WED')
tff has no influence on the flickering. But fields has. fields=all => flickering fields=top => no flickering feilds=bottom => no flickering
BTW: there is no sound with this script. Is this to be expected?
> BTW: there is no sound with this script. Is this to be expected? Yes, that's expected. Thanks for the observations.
I'm pretty sure that the submitter's "flickering" is just normal deinterlacing artifacts with the linear filter.
Maybe we should set fields to top or bottom instead of all to get around these artifacts. Would give lower but at least gets around the artifacts usually. What do you think, David?
Possibly related to, if not the same as, bug #617778 ?
I think so, see comment 13 :)
slomo, IMO, fields=top/bottom or fields=all is a sane default when combined with the linear filter. There exists video content that will make any specific choice look bad, but not too bad. The best solution is to write a better filter than mode=linear, specifically one that uses cross-field matching (copying good lines from adjacent fields) and non-linear interpolation (such as edge-directed interpolation). We have yadif in -bad, which is a drop-in replacement for deinterlace, but is GPL-only. I am slowly working up to either rewriting yadif (with an MIT or LGPL license) or writing a new algorithm. We need this at Rdio and it's on my to-do list, but is low priority since yadif and ivtc are adequate.
#617778 does not apply to the linear filter. IIRC, the major problem remaining is that fields are shifted in time by two field durations for the more complex filters.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-good/issues/86.