Detecting VBI or true video height? Is there a way to detect if a file has or has not Vbi data this way! 
I.e if a Pal videofile with the reported 720x576 has Vbi data the actual height is an additional 32 lines = 608.

SD pal file VBI = 720x608 

I am not interested in the info in those 32 lines - I just want to know if they are present or not ( to be able to make an decicion)

So far from what I can see ffmpeg and Medialinfo reports my VBI samples as 720X576 - but I know they are 608. 

Maybe I am using the wrong tools or the wrong flags / cli arguments? 

Many tnx!
Containers like LXF/GXF/MXF allow EIA-708 (VBI) streams but as far as I know they do not encode the video data -- the blanking interval -- that originally contained those streams. That would run counter to the idea that codecs embody, that of squeezing out redundant information. I could be wrong, but I've never seen or heard of a codec that encodes invisible lines.

You could scan the file for the packet headers that identify caption / VBI streams, and if you find them you could impute a frame size that would have contained them, but you could do that anyway: any encoded video, if it were output as a TV signal, would have associated blanking, whether it contained captions or not.