how do you determine field order?

i've used the search and it seems different people say different things: i believe doom9's guide says to open tmpg and try the different field layer orders and run a deinterlacer filter, but i've done that and it's been wrong in the past (with a tv show series i encoded) and another guide says to use bitrate viewer to tell if it's top-field first or not. that's been wrong multiple times as well (a few movies and the tv show series). another person said that it's impossible to tell unless you output (using video output cards, etc) to a tv or something since the computer monitor will not show you jumpy-ness. it seems that whenever i tried top-field first it was wrong, so it's always been bottom-field first so far. is there any way to tell for sure without outputting video to my tv? or is it generally bottom-field first and only a few dvd's are top-field first? thanks.

for me just about all dvd's are top first. I use bitrate viewer, no problems so far on 60 dvd copies

run the file thru and avisynth script that converts 25/30fps interlaced into 50/60fps progressive (possibly need to force field) and see if it stutters, add the swapfields command to see if it makes any difference. at work the way i tell is to hook up a tv to the Canopus Amber and playback the .m2v file, and if it jumps, i use DVMPEG Fixer to change the field order. you can do similar if you have a MPEG-2 playback card. Enf... Code: