Deinterlacing - RipBot264 and DVD's

Last night I decided that I wanted to re-do my Cars backup.

I had a nice WMV version of the movie, done by Win X DVD Ripper Platinum, but I got annoyed at the end of the movie when the lamborghini is talking in Italian and there was no subtitle associated with it.

Looking at the actual movie, there is no subtitle there either. But I wanted one, and its my copy, so I decided to re-do it with a translated subtitle there. :)

So, I used SubRip pointed out to me there are no forced subtitles in Cars for English. And that when it shows all subtitles, it just gives the straight Italian. So, I had to translate that and put together my own SRT file with just the 2 relevant lines in it.

The next trick was actually ripping it with RipBot264 so that I could insert the subtitles. This is when I learned about deinterlacing.

Often (but not always), when I rip DVD's with RipBot264 I would get an annoying effect in the video. I found out it is called Combing, and it looks something like this: (image from wikipedia.com, deinterlace article)

As you can see in the image, there are these odd horizontal lines, and can be really annoying when you are watching the movie. I'm not going to go into why  those lines show up, or why they only show up for some movies. You can go to wikipedia to learn about that. I'm going to tell you how I dealt with them, and will deal with them in the future.

Ripbot264 has a nice little toggle in its UI to optionally allow you to do deinterlacing. When converting a DVD to AVCHD for the purpose of watching through your XBox media extender, I suggest taking the following steps:

1. Configure your movie conversion per normal, setting up subtitles as appropriate.
2. Check the 'Preview Movie' in the dialog that comes up under 'Properties' when configuring a movie. If you see the 'combing' then you will need to deinterlace. If you don't see the coming, then you don't need to. (for example, with my Star Wars movies, I did not need to deinterlace)
3. Set your deinterlace option.
       a. Try "Inverse Telecine" first. Then check the preview and see how it looks. If it looks good. Keep it.
       b. If "Inverse Telecine" does not look good, then try both of the 29.97 fps setting, picking the one that looks best to you in the preview. I've heard Top Field First (TFF) is better, but go with what you like
4. Finish out the dialogs and start converting.

If you have any other suggestions, or reasons why what I'm reccomending is not the best idea, let me know.