[Vchat20]

So this has been one mind-bender that has been nagging at me for a while and that has been the battle between Interlaced and Progressive content and the supposed 'need' to deinterlace said interlaced content from the getgo in many encoding situations.

Here's my take on it: If the original content is already progressive, there really isn't much to do there. And there really is no way to 'interlace' it back again since theorhetically you'd just end up with identical frames anyhow.

If the original content was interlaced on the other hand, you are at the maximum of quality in terms of retaining as much information as you can. Deinterlacing inherently loses information even with the best deinterlacing filters. In addition, most playback devices/software at least with good built in filters are capable of doing good deinterlacing on the fly during playback. Many software dvd codecs are a good example of this.

With this all said and done, why do you suppose it has long been such a habit of deinterlacing every piece of content regardless of destination? What are your opinions on the matter.

FYI: This is not saying 'OMFG you must stop deinterlacing', but more of a start of a debate as to why you think this is still commonplace.