How to handle mpeg2 movies flagged wrong (interlaced <--> progressive)

How to handle mpeg2 movies flagged wrong (interlaced <--> progressive) 

I'm recording Comcast cable TV. It looks like there's some content that that's incorrectly flagged when playing it back via cyberlink pdvd 8 mpeg2 video decoder. I'm curious what easiest options I have to watch these recordings correctly. For example: 1- Could configure my pdvd video decoder (directshow NOT CYBERLINK PLAYER) to try different deinterlacing menthods that dont depend on flags? I know these options are available for the PowerDVD player itself. However, I dont know how to change these options of for the direct show filter only. 2- A very simple software that can read the flag attribute of a video clip and allow me to change it. I'm not sure if this can be done without re-encoding (which i dont want to do at all). Thanks! MKANET

Read MPEG2 specs.

Go ahead and upload sample clips. That's usually the quickest way to get a definitive answer.

Here's one clip... it definitely doesnt play correctly on my setup. Maybe you can find something in the flags that would cause it to playback incorrectly.

It's 3:2 pulldown using a combination of hard and soft pulldown. I've seen a few of these lately. I would expect such streams to thoroughly confuse some players. I doubt that you can fix this by changing interlaced/progressive flagging.

It's very common for real-time HD MPEG-2 encoders to fall in and out of inverse telecine. Here's a command line utility to dump the telecine flags of MPEG-2 video elementary streams: For example, here's the dump from a portion of mkanet's file. Code:

Below video is only 12MB's and is a perfect example of jump video and flashes of deinterlace combing artifacts. It's happening once every 3 seconds. Maybe there's some flags in the video that might have you a hint to whats wrong. Thanks!

I just found out what's wrong. It was my display adapter (8800GT). I swapped it out with my old Nvidia 8600GT, and it played everything back using the same decoders, same driver (and driver settings). I dont know how the card got damaged specifically that way without affecting anything else.