A system and method for reducing interlace artifacts during trick mode playback of pre-encoded content. The system and method operate a decoder to receive a video signal, configured as frames, with each frame having a plurality of interlaced fields, and to provide a video output in interlaced format or trick mode format. When operating in a normal mode, the decoder provides the video output in the interlaced format. When operating in trick mode, the decoder is instructed to use one of the fields of a frame as a reference field, and outputs a video output frame in the trick mode format where both fields of the video output frame are the same as the reference field. The video signal can be a streaming video or read from a medium.