Play High Definition movie smoothly with VLC

VLC is a wonderful player. It can almost play all kind of videos that I have. It’s lightweight and best of all… it’s free! I don’t know what else to ask.

Except this… for several months I have noticed that when I played a high definition movie, it kind of getting chobby. It seemed that I have a line in the video. It made my eyes sick and I almost always try to avoid a HD movie (and hoping the problem will be fixed with the next version of VLC or Mac OS).

Today I got my Snow Leopard and VLC has left its beta status but I still get the horizontal line when I watch an HD movie. This is an example of it.

I thought… this is it. Either I manage to fix the problem in VLC or I have to find a new video player.

It turned out finding a better video player was a harder task.

So I began searching the web for a fix of that problem. It’s not that hard to find a solution, but to get the correct keywords is the harder puzzle. So in VLC forum, people suggested to use the filtering capability in VLC. At least there are three suggestions.

1. To turn on the scale filter and use a better algorithm for it.
2. To turn on the post processing filter and maximize the number of the post processing.
3. To turn on the deinterlace filter.

I tried all of them to get the best solution, and after a while, I got a conclusion that turning on the deinterlace filter is the best answer. This was the result of it:

As you can see, the horizontal line is gone, but the picture is still not that sharp.

Not so satisfied with the result, I searched further for better solution. This time I got a better answer quicker. By using an algorithm named ‘Bob’ for deinterlacing, I got a better result as can be seen in the following picture.

Now I’m glad!

Step by step instructions

If you are a type of person who needs a complete step-by-step instructions, this is what I did:

1. Open VLC
2. Select Preferences from the Menu ‘VLC’
3. Activate the ‘All’ check box in the left bottom of the dialog
4. Go to Video->Filters, activate the checkbox ‘Deinterlacing video filter’
5. Go to Video->Filters->Deinterlace
6. Change the deinterlace mode to ‘Bob’
7. Click save
8. Restart the VLC
9. Play the video, hopefully you will get a better video playback

Do you have more tips how to optimize the settings in VLC? Please share here! I’d be glad to have a better and sharper image for my video.