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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting!

I can't stand motion interpolation. Turned off on every TV I own. Will literally walk away and do something else if it's on a (non-sports) TV in public. There's something "too smooth" about it that irks me.

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Same here. It feels like it takes everything, from classic B&W to modern SF extravaganzas, and turns them all into somebody's home videos.

At the same time, I'm pretty confident that this is a subjective phenomenon. My parents have it on all their TVs and my mother both prefers it and notices immediately if video isn't 60fps or equivalent, while my father says he doesn't notice the difference.

I tend to avoid it, but don't constantly try out newer devices and their settings. I always remember when I first saw it on a proud friend's new TV about a decade ago. I was deeply disturbed and asked him to turn off the feature.

We were watching an action/fighting movie with swords and other martial arts, and I distinctly saw these graceful arcs of the actors' limbs and weapons turned into polygons. The motion interpolation clearly inferred linear transitions between the different positions captured in the actual frames. Imagine a large swing tracing out an octagonal path with all the physical unreality that would entail.

It seemed like I was the only one in the room who perceived this travesty.

Usually TVs have bad motion interpolation which ruins the concept for many people. I use SmoothVideoProject on my computer which uses your GPU to analyze the motion vectors between frames via deep learning (Nvidia optical flow analysis) so it's much better.

The problem typically is that motion interpolation isn't consistently smooth. Generally a fixed framerate 30fps will seem smoother than something that goes between 40-60fps. Our brains are sensitive to changes in the pacing.

The motion of an object isn’t the same as the frame rate though. You can have a 60fps scene where an object is moving fast on one side of the screen and slow on the other. It only means that for a given object travelling from A to B - it will have more fine detail in its movement for a given distance.

It’s interesting to think how different our visual systems must be right? I’m always saying to friends “how can you watch this? It’s so choppy!” And some of them agree and others don’t see it at all.

Biology is weird so I say just give people the options to pick what works for them.

I read this (from HN?) awhile ago, and it boggled my mind about how much subjective reality is actually invisibly self-fabricated.

https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...

I expect refresh rate is similar, given that... if a substantial portion of your subjective perception is mentally fabricated, then your brain physiology contributes, and that's set during childhood.

For reference, I grew up on NTSC screens (29.97 interlaced frames per second).

> For reference, I grew up on NTSC screens (29.97 interlaced frames per second).

Considering it as 30 interlaced frames per second isn't really accurate. It's 60 fields per second. A lot of content intended for interlaced broadcast is not 30 fps broken into fields, it's 60 distinct half pictures per second.

(Excuse my rounding)

That link is an article I really, really wish I'd read while learning how to drive, and is something I'll teach my kid before he starts riding a bike with traffic. I hadn't seen it before, so thanks.

That and the Dutch(?) bike-safety trick [0] are minimal effort life hacks I got from HN.

[0] In urban/bike areas, always open a car door with your opposite hand (e.g. driver's side with right hand). It forces you to turn your body, which allows you to look behind you, which lets you notice bikers approaching from behind before you open the door and splat them.

Usually TVs have bad implementations while on the PC, using something like SmoothVideoProject which uses your GPU for motion vector analysis via optical flow makes it much more high quality.

Also, you get used to it after a while. At first I was similarly jarred by the smoothness, as if it were fast forwarded, but after a few hours of getting used to it, when I saw 24 FPS content, it was literally unwatchable as it looked like a slideshow to me.

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