So on my backend machine I have to turn the deinterlace on or I get wavyness on any medium to fast moving parts of the screen. On a different frontend machine using that same backend I don't have that issue and I noticed that with the deinterlace set to auto on that machine the quality is worse so I turned it off because it's not needed. My questions is why does one machine have issues and the other doesn't? They are both running the same version of ubuntu and xbmc. The one that remotely accesses the backend has an added on graphics card, much faster processor, and 4 times as much RAM. Is there something I could upgrade in the backend machine so it plays smoothly without the deinterlace on?
you should tell machine specs and os. deinterlacing capabilities depend on gfx hardware. i dunno how it's nowadays but some time ago there was no deinterlacing support for intel gpus, even when there is that option available in xbmc. that's why i added an geforce 210 to my machine. and not all settings work flawlessly. i'm using auto with vdpau-bob and bilinear scaling. other settings don't work.
deinterlace has to do with playback, which is frontend dependent NOT backend. are you saying when watching something on your backend/frontend combo computer you have to use the deinterlace feature to get acceptable playback? it's due to the video card in your backend/frontend.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Deinterlacing#Deinterlacing
Ok, that's what I was wondering. Thanks.