I've slowly been trying to improve my encoding techniques to send videos to a friend stuck overseas. She uses a laptop to view the videos.

I have a 1.4GHz Athlon with 512MB RAM and an old STB PCI TV card. I capture at 720x480 using HuffYUV. Occasionally I run out of I/O buffers, but turning off preview seems to help.

Since DivX looks better than MPEG-1 for the same bitrates, I've been de-interlacing in VirtualDub, then shrinking to half size and applying noise reduction and color correction. On smooth-motion scenes, I still got sort of a stuttering appearance. This was very irritating.

I started reading about inverse telecine and 3:2 pulldown, etc. Being lazy, I don't want to have to resort to Avisynth. So I tried the telecide filter, followed by smartsmoother. I also enables 3:2 pulldown (adaptive) in VirtualDub.

Preliminary tests show this smooths out the slight stuttering I had before. Spaceships cruise smoothly through space on Enterprise, for instance. Is there a better way of doing this? I'm only getting about 5fps after using all these filters. (temporal smoothing is great!)