I am trying to use WD TV Live to play video files from my edit program Final Cut Express. These are encoded into Quicktime MP4 format at 1080/60i (same as what the camera uses). I want to feed the TV a 1080/60i signal via HDMI, so I set the WD TV Live to 1080/60i output. Half the time when I start a video, I get an excellent result–smooth motion, no artifacts Other times a problem occurs when there is horizontal movement in the video. I get double images at the moving edges. This happens on all the TVs I tried. Here is what it looks like:
I generated the files using FCE export and made sure to not select “deinterlace source video”. I have also generated files from MPEG StreamClip, also specifying interlaced output. I have no reason to think that these are other than 1080/60i. I have also made progressive files using both programs, they come out 1080/30p. These actually play cleanly on the WD TV Live using either 1080i or 1080p settings on the WD unit. The 1080p output just duplicates frames to get from 30p to 60p. The result is that motion is not smooth and the Sony “Smooth Motion” frame interpolation doesn’t work well.
I repeat, half the time I get a good, clean playback from the 1080i files, and when that works, it is perfect. However, every time I start or pause and restart the video, i risk going into the “bad” mode.
