Dvsd field order and mplayer

Some stand alone DVD players (some Clearplay for sure) will not play a disk that doesn't have it's files correctly sorted -- says "Invalid disk" or some such.

The files on a DVD are supposed to be sorted a certain way as they exist on the DVD. mkisofs (which is called by growisofs) will sort the files in the correct way but only if they are all upper case names! Since fat32 does not allow all upper case names, it's best to not create ISOs or DVDs with mkisofs or growisofs if said source files reside on a filesystem which does not allow all upper case or if the files in VIDEO_TS are not all upper case. Without the correct sorting, some DVD players will refuse to play the disk (but not all.)

Also, when converting dvsd (the dv AVI files produced by a default dvgrab or kino when capturing video via firewire from most MiniDV and Digital8 cameras) tovid 0.30 by default ends up producing mpegs with the field order swapped -- which makes the video extremely jerky or juddery. Basically it's playing the video with every pair of pictures (fields) in backwards order.

To solve this, I edited the tovid script (do a which tovid to find it) and searched for :interlaced and replaced it with :interlaced_bf

The old line looked like this: YUV4MPEG_ILACE=":interlaced" The new line looks like this: YUV4MPEG_ILACE=":interlaced_bf"

This :interlaced_bf is a flag that tovid passes to mplayer (mplayer is what's used to decode the dv avi file to raw video) anyway, this flag tells mplayer to put out interlaced rather then the default of progressive. The _bf added on to interlaced tells it to send the bottom field first, rather then the default of top.

I don't know whether the problem is with tovid or mplayer, but at least this is a workaround.

Please feel free to update/fix/whatever this article -- I didn't have time to make it perfect but wanted the info there in case someone else was having the same problem I was. -Jesse

• • Note: I tried the -interlaced_bf switch which does the same