Play the DVD using mplayer -dvd N where N is the title
number. Pay attention to the status line, which will look something
like this:
A: 391.8 V: 391.8 A-V: -0.002 ct: -0.104 200/197 21% 9% 25.0% 6 0 0%
It is important that you perform this experiment on the actual movie content itself and not the introductory splash screen that may be present on the DVD, since the splash screens very often use a different frame rate from the movie itself.
To understand inverse pulldown, you first need to understand pulldown.
Regular television video is interlaced, meaning that the odd numbered scanlines are displayed first, followed by the even numbered scanlines, then the odd ones again, then the even ones again, etc. Each individual line is displayed 30 times a second, but because of the interlacing, the television image as a whole is refreshed 60 times a second, with only half of the total lines being refreshed each time.
For regular television video, there is no way to recover perfect video frames, because no matter where you are in the video the odd numbered lines are always offset 1/60th of a second from the even numbered lines. There is a technique called deinterlacing which can approximately reconstruct original video frames based on the limited information available in the interlaced video, but deinterlacing is only an approximation and using it will result in some loss of quality.
However, most theatrical movies and anime shows are not filmed using television cameras. Instead they are filmed with film cameras (or, in the case of anime, drawn by hand) at a non-interlaced frame rate of 24 frames per second. In order to display these on TV screens, the 24 frames per second is deliberately interlaced to 30 frames per second using a process called pulldown, also known as telecine, which I will not explain because it is much better explained here or here.
What makes all this important is that, unlike regular television interlacing, the pulldown process can usually be perfectly reversed provided that you know it is there and you have a filter specifically designed to reverse it (that is, NOT a deinterlace filter--most deinterlace filters are not specifically designed to handle telecine). The reversal process is called inverse telecine or inverse pulldown.
Here are some frame grabs illustrating the above concepts (click for full frames):
Follow the directions in the
video encoding
section, but change the line 32detect=force_mode=3 to
32detect=force_mode=3:verbose instead, leaving everything else
the same. You will get a bunch of output on the screen that looks
something like:
(0) frame [044265]: (1) = 243 | (2) = 245 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044266]: (1) = 199 | (2) = 240 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044267]: (1) = 215 | (2) = 230 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044268]: (1) = 235 | (2) = 229 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044269]: (1) = 220 | (2) = 244 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044270]: (1) = 243 | (2) = 249 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044271]: (1) = 230 | (2) = 256 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044272]: (1) = 206 | (2) = 218 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044273]: (1) = 213 | (2) = 200 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044274]: (1) = 223 | (2) = 180 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044275]: (1) = 188 | (2) = 192 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044276]: (1) = 210 | (2) = 219 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044277]: (1) = 238 | (2) = 218 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044278]: (1) = 211 | (2) = 202 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044279]: (1) = 211 | (2) = 199 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044280]: (1) = 223 | (2) = 224 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
(0) frame [044281]: (1) = 178 | (2) = 241 | (3) = 1 | interlaced = no
interlaced = no in the right hand column, then
you have succeeded in reversing the pulldown and removing the
interlacing.
For comparison, here is an example of an unsuccessful attempt at inverse pulldown:
(0) frame [001042]: (1) = 55619 | (2) = 56592 | (3) = 324 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001043]: (1) = 27924 | (2) = 28296 | (3) = 162 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001044]: (1) = 26425 | (2) = 26147 | (3) = 152 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001045]: (1) = 30923 | (2) = 31739 | (3) = 181 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001046]: (1) = 21860 | (2) = 22136 | (3) = 127 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001047]: (1) = 22056 | (2) = 22412 | (3) = 128 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001048]: (1) = 16845 | (2) = 16770 | (3) = 97 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001049]: (1) = 13148 | (2) = 12792 | (3) = 75 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001050]: (1) = 13294 | (2) = 12528 | (3) = 74 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001051]: (1) = 12787 | (2) = 12408 | (3) = 72 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001052]: (1) = 12216 | (2) = 11771 | (3) = 69 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001053]: (1) = 15243 | (2) = 15207 | (3) = 88 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001054]: (1) = 18621 | (2) = 18998 | (3) = 108 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001055]: (1) = 17195 | (2) = 17149 | (3) = 99 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001056]: (1) = 16599 | (2) = 16748 | (3) = 96 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001057]: (1) = 13009 | (2) = 12705 | (3) = 74 | interlaced = yes
(0) frame [001058]: (1) = 10831 | (2) = 11430 | (3) = 64 | interlaced = yes
Download the latest tar.gz release from the
distribution site
(dvdauthor-0.5.3.tar.gz as of this writing). Put the file
somewhere, and (as root) run the command
rpmbuild -ta dvdauthor-0.5.3.tar.gz
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/dvdauthor-0.5.3-1.*.i386.rpm file
which you can then install.
Create a PPML script containing the following four lines:
*counter frame_counter
1 *counter font_dir=/usr/share/mplayer/iso-8859-1/arial-28
2 *counter xpos=20 ypos=20
3 *counter sat=80.0 contr=70
You can use the mencoder program included with
mplayer to subtitle using the
mplayer engine. Most of this material is covered pretty thoroughly in
the
previous version of this guide.
The subtitles produced by mencoder look better on a computer
screen than transcode, but worse on a TV screen. On the other
hand, mencoder is for now the only program that supports
subtitles in asian language character sets.
The xste program combined with submux-dvd allows you to generate soft (switchable) DVD subtitles that can be turned on or off by the DVD player. If anyone who speaks English figures out how to get this combination working, let me know.
The
subtitler-yuv program is a standalone alternative to the
subtitler plugin in transcode. It uses the same PPML script format,
but instead of being a transcode filter it functions as a standalone
program taking input video on STDIN and writing subtitled video on
STDOUT. This strategy has the major advantage that the same video can
be chained through multiple instantiations of subtitler-yuv, to
imprint multiple subtitle streams onto a single video.