Deinterlacing

Video streams captured from TV or VCR in high resolutions usually contain "interlacing" artifacts. For example, maximum allowed height for NTSC is 480 lines at 30 frames/second. However, the actual television signal has a frequency of 60Hz and vertical resolution of only 320 lines. Thus, captured streams will contain interleaving lines from two subsequent "fields," which have different positions in time.

Look at the screenshot:

This is a good example of 'interlaced' picture. Here is the same picture after deinterlacing:

The good thing about deinterlacing inside the encoder is that it's done almost for free. The most popular video processing applications include deinterlacing filters, but they can eat up to 15-20 percent or more of the time. In contrast, deinterlacing in the encoder takes no more than 1-2 percent of CPU power.

The default setting for "Deinterlacing" is "off."

Do not use deinterlacing inside the codec if input stream was resized or otherwise preprocessed in some way. If you want to do complex filtering of interlaced stream. always use external deinterlacing and put deinterlacing filter first in the pipeline.