Hi everyone,

I've done a search for my problem on the forums and not come up with anything; forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere.

I'm trying to encode a DVD using Gordian Knot (full), and the problem is that the newest footage in the film is from 1984, and not the greatest quality in some parts. On the original VOBs (3 gb), there are parts where the image has a bit of distortion, just a bit of graininess - but when its encoded, the grains turn into small blocks. Not TOO bad, and not on the whole image, just small parts. I've done a few runs (2x700MB - 1 hr, 23 mins) with DivX 5.2.1 and Xvid 1.01, and I can't seem to get rid of the blockiness. The Xvid files seem a bit clearer, but not by much. The .avi's come out around 2125 kbps; 0.239 bits/pixel.

I have set the quantization to both H.263 and MPEG-2; and used adaptive-single b-frames - no QPEL or GMC (these always seem to screw the video up big time). The video has probably an equal amount of hi and lo-motion sequences, so I've left PVE off. (The blocks are mostly in the lo-motion parts).

I've tried the MSU Deblocking filter with VirtualDub and this only made it worse, and also increased the filesize by arounf 40%.

If anyone has some suggestions on how to get rid of the blocks (either thru encoding or another filter), I'd love to hear it. I'm an intermediate-level encoder, so my knowledge is kind of 'here & there'.

Thanks!