Does anybody have any idea what this post is about?
I think it’s the frame interpolation feature that a lot of TVs have.
It’s a terrible effect, and people who don’t spend much time in their TV’s setup may not know or think to turn it off - or they delude themselves into thinking they like the effect.
If you’re watching a tv and the frame rate hitches all over the place every few seconds then one of these stupid fucking settings is on.
The shit wouldn’t be so fucking awful if it could actually maintain a stable frame rate but it can’t. None of them can.
Yes
Motion smoothing, frame interpolation features in TVs. It’s what makes movement look unnatural and on default TV settings. Old people can’t tell/don’t understand so it’s customary to sneakily disable it for them when visiting
Yes. Motion smoothing. It’s like kerning or the Wilhelm scream. Once you notice it, you’ll hate it.
It makes the slow panning forests and splashy paint videos in Currys look nice, but it makes movies and TV shows look terrible.
Nvidia calls it DLSS and pretends its new
Wait DLSS is about upscaling right? The “features” mentioned in OP’s post are about motion interpolation that makes the video seem to be playing at higher fps than the standard 24fps used in movies and shows.
It allows more resolution by cutting the fps. Fake frames are inserted into the gaps to get the fps back.
That’s frame generation, not dlss. DLSS renders small and upscales.
It is all called “bullshitted pixels” and I’m having none of it.
Its simply “visual noise” that tricks the viewer into thinking they are getting more of something than they are. Its a cheap inconsistent filler. Its nvidia not admitting they hit a technical wall and needing a way to force new inferior products onto the market to satisfy sales.
Because names mean nothing Nvidia has also labeled their frame generation as “DLSS”.
Shouldn’t it be more like Motion Blur?
Motion blur is consistent and reproducible using math. The other isn’t. Something that cannot produce consistent results and is sold as a solution does have a name though: snake oil.
Yeah, but only PC owners can have it so they think it’s good.
I ve read the post, i ve read the comments, i have still no idea what are we talking about
The post is about when you are a tech savvy person, and go to a relative’s house for the holiday and see some piece of tech with default configuration. Often tech companies (especially TV companies) enable buzzword technology to trick non tech savvy people into believing there was an improvement where there actually wasn’t. Often, inspection with a more educated eye reveals that the result actually looks bad and ruins the original media (unless it was already terrible).
In this case the gripe is with frame smoothing technologies, which look smeared and ruin details and timing of movies. But to someone who doesn’t know better it looks like “whoa, it really is smoother, I’m gonna smooth all the smoothing with my new extra smooth smoother; the smoothness salesman sold me real smooth on this” (I’m calling out the dishonest seller, not the consumer with this).
So when the tech savvy person sees the swindled relative, they try to fix up the situation disabling the bullshit, but every brand gives it a different patented bullshit name.
It’s worth noting that inevitably, as soon as you leave the house the relatives will:
- Not notice a thin
- Call you because the TV “doesn’t do the thing it did before anymore” and you have to explain that you did it and why it’s better until they ask you to put it back
- Spend too much time trying to pot back the thing on their own, making even worse choices along the way
To actually help them you should have been involved in the choice of device, but if you ever got involved in a choice you would automatically become the designated tech purchase advisor forever and ever.
But…why don’t you just let your relatives use their things as they want?
Cause they deserve better
Or they don’t know better
So leave everything in the default settings no matter how bad?
Aah, the joys of leaving well enough alone.
Go watch any old (think Cinderella, Bambi) Disney movie on Disney+. Notice how it’s nice and sharp. It’s been upscaled. Notice how the frame rate is fast, it’s been interpolated.
Now, closely watch the edges of the lines. They are inconsistent, smeared and now you can’t not see it… Sorry
Many modern TVs are now doing this by default and it’s rarely a better experience.
It’s a setting in newer TVs that “smooths” frames for lower quality media to maximize the capabilities of modern TV hardware. It very rarely looks good. This post lists what the major manufacturers call the technology.
You’re the one whose tv will be fixed when family comes to visit over the holidays.
What
It’s the setting to disable on smart TVs for a better image. The option can do one or more of the following: adds in-between frames, reduces noise, and upscales video. Sounds good, but the implementation is always terrible.
Is this what that uncanny “too smooth” look is on my parents TV? Whenever I’d go to visit them whatever they had on always looked like the camera motion or character movement was way too smooth to the point it was kind of unsettling.
The “soap opera” effect. Filmmakers hate this
Animators too. FFS, when you deliberately position a character to look fluid, life-like, and emphatic at a frame rate, you have to respect it, or you lose it! Adding frames willy-nilly ruins movies and animation. Don’t like it? Wanna be a gamer? Well, maybe just sit tight and accept that you have to trust that the artist, idfk, knew how to do their fucking job.
Personal rant here. I hate automated interpolation. I would literally prefer it if you deep-fried my work by overcompressing it over and over to ‘save space.’
Yup
It brings you gorgeous frames like this:
Aqua just looks like that.
that’s just Aqua
Looks like the usual Aqua to me
I’m enjoying LG’s implementation. 🤷♂️ I have that stuff enabled, but not on the outputs where I play games.
I’ve been exposed to a smart TV only once in my life, and I hated the experience so much 😅
How is that possible in 2025?
My 55 inch rca has been going strong for a decade and it’s just monitors other than that
Maybe they were born yesterday?
I usually hate those too…
But they are not universally bad. OLED screens have almost instantaneous response times, which if paired with lateral movement and content shot at 24 FPS can become a stuttery mess instead of a smooth camera pan. In some movies, it’s enough to give me a headache.
In those scenarios, one of the interpolation settings available on my LG C1 instantly fixes the issue and does not add significant artifacts. The goal isn’t simulating 120 FPS on a TV show, but working around content filmed at abysmally low FPS (which was relevant when film was expensive and we used blurry TVs, not good for 2025).
Black frame insertion?
This is in regard to motion smoothing which is enabled by default on modern TVs, and give the effect of a soap opera look. People think that it makes the video look better, but it’s just adding fake frames to display at a higher frame rate. Not a lot of people like this: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/motion-smoothing-how-to-shut-off-1235176633/
To make matters worse, all TV brands have their own name for this feature. This post is saying that when you go home for the holidays, this is the name of the motion smoothing in the settings to turn off for a better viewing experience the way the filmmaker intends.
Oh god this must be what my parents have on their TV- I thought it looked that way bc it’s 4k. A soap opera look is exactly how I described it! That’s been my only exposure to new/smart TVs
I agree that it’s awful. Why do you think they enable it by default? What’s their game?
Boomer detected.
So they can turn off AI enhancements on their relatives’ TV.
I’ve been turning off smoothing for at least 15, years at this point. Not every terrible tech is AI.
I went to a friend’s house recently where this was enabled. I couldn’t bite my tongue for more than a few minutes before I had to bring it up. They were instantly impressed with how much better it looked lol.
My friends did that at my TV, I never noticed the difference
I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t mind it.
Shit, maybe I’m old and that’s what everyone else is going to look for and turn off.
This is what it did to my anime:
It’s less egregious on live action content but still noticeable
So it turns human made content into AI looking content?
Well, it uses AI to insert extra frames in between the real frames. So it doesn’t just look like AI content, it is AI content, spliced between every frame of your anime.
I’m hesitant to call it AI for the stuff available on TVs. It’s similar at some level but drastically simpler and the tech most TVs will use has been around way longer than what we’d typically call AI. Motion smoothing is usually math and algorithms we mostly could understand.
Now, if we’re talking DLSS/etc on a PC, yeah, that probably qualifies as AI but there’s a lot more that goes into that.
My dad was watching once upon Time in the west with true motion and I almost put him in a home then and there.
what is the actual usecase of this interpolation feature? it should require capable hardware, so it doesn’t exist for nothing.
To further elaborate, on LG TVs it’s in the “Clarity” menu.
Thank you for not typing “TV’s”
Thank you for noticing!
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second, plus some neural frame interpolation spliced in between.”
- Jensen Godard, probably
I am using a panasonic from 2008 😅
How new does your TV have to be to have this? I just scrolled through settings and couldn’t find it. Is it normally in screen settings?
If it’s a smart TV, it’s probably there. Might be under a different name. I think my 6 year old Samsung calls it motion smoothing
It could be in “input settings” too, since it may be device-specific (HDMI 1 on Game mode, etc.)
My plasma “”“120"”" Hz plasma true-motion-plus enabled Panasonic had that shit and it was a decade old.
Thanks! Now I know how to turn it on for every TV I see.
If you paid for 120Hz, you should be utilizing every available frame, even if you have to generate fake ones.
I agree. The picture should also be stretched to cover the entire screen, regardless of the original aspect ratio. I’m not paying for black bars!
Are you my mom?
No. I am a snort.
