Topic pretty much says it all. Is there any software (commercial or otherwise, preferably free though, of course) that can help to improve quality on VCD-level MPEG video? Doesn't have to be realtime conversion by any means, for all I care it can take a day to restore an hour of video, it just needs to work. Mainly I want to tone down the blockiness in areas where there's more motion. Also, any software you know of that might have a nice filter for increasing the resolution a bit would be helpful. Thanks in advance.
I use virtualdubmod, apply whatever filters you need, then frameserve to re-encode. There's a nice filter called MSU deblocking (google it), as well as the HSV, Sharpen, and Levels filters to fix other things (those are the ones I use most).
When working with a Low Quality and Low resolution Format Like VCD you are not going to have Much success cleaning up the Image because to add the filters to clean up the Image would entail re-encodeing the Video file which will degrade the Quality More than the Filters will Improve the quality.....
Yeah, I know, but I'm transfering a couple VCDs to DVD, so the destination bitrate/codec will be superior by a pretty long shot, so I just wanted to improve things as much as I could before burning the disc. Right now I'm 29.5 hours in with about 9 more to go, so I guess I'll see if it was worth it tomorrow morning. I think I'm going to look into upgrading my CPU before I do anything like this again though. Lucky I shut down to hibernation about 15 minutes before the power went out!
Instead of re-encoding, just author them directly to dvd in DVDLab. Demux and transcode audio when prompted.
