NVIDIA Enables PureVideo on GeForce 6 GPUs

A Brief Look at De-Interlacing Modes

The process of taking interlaced content and displaying it in a non-interlaced form is often referred to as de-interlacing (for obvious reasons). There are two basic methods of de-interlacing, commonly known as "bob" and "weave."

Bob de-interlacing is more technically referred to as linear interpolation and it simply fills in the missing lines of resolution by interpolating between the resolution lines that are available. This interpolation form of de-interlacing is particularly useful if there are a lot of solid colors on the screen and if the decoder screws up and decides to combine two fields from different frames.

Weave de-interlacing, as the name implies, simply combines alternating lines of resolution from two separate interlaced fields. Using either method individually is generally not the best way of doing things, but thanks to the decent amount of power in today's PCs more sophisticated algorithms can be implemented to dynamically switch between bob and weave on a per pixel basis within a frame (usually referred to as adaptive per pixel de-interlacing).

NVIDIA's PureVideo supposedly takes adaptive per pixel de-interlacing one step further with what they call Spatial-Temporal de-interlacing. The idea here is that normal per pixel adaptive de-interlacing uses data from fields within a single frame to essentially fill in the blanks. NVIDIA's Spatial-Temporal de-interlacing can use data from fields in other frames to improve de-interlacing quality. We'll have to see if this ends up improving quality or not in our tests later in the article.