[fontkodo]

Here is how traditional digital video players display 24FPS content on a 60Hz monitor, they use the 3:2 pulldown technique. This means that the first frame will be displayed 3 times, the second frame 2 times, resulting in slight juddering of most content. Like this (where each pixel represents a frame):

A A A B B C C C D D E E E F F

I recently discovered a neat little player called MPV, MPV has interpolation features that let you make your videos look smoother on a 60Hz screen. This is often associated with the 'soap opera' effect and many people think that this makes the video look cheap, kind of like a cheap soap opera. But MPV has a feature called smoothvideo, this uses a different algorithm that displays each video frame 2.5 times and thus reduces any unevenness in content playback while preserving the framerate. This is very easy to calculate and looks like this:

A A A+B B B C C C+D D D E E E+F F F

Note: This is different from motion-based interpolation that so many people are protesting against, this does NOT affect the frame rate or attempt to use motion vectors to fill in frames, it merely blends and displays frames at 2.5 times, it is very smooth.

How to enable

Navigate to the mpv site and download the build for your OS, it will probably not offer you an installer but just give you the file to run.

mpv.io | Installation

After you've opened it up once, it will create a folder to store preferences.

On Windows: C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\mpv
On Linux: /etc/mpv

Create an mpv.conf file here and put this in it.

vo=opengl:interpolation
video-sync=display-resample

On Linux you will need to copy and paste the file from a user directory using sudo.

That's it, it should start using smoothvideo to play back your videos, enjoy that smooth 24FPS!