Help, trying to remove noise from Simpsons mpegs

[AaronL]

I am fairly new to the world of encoding as was wondering if anyone could help me. I am trying to start a collection of simpsons vcds but since i don't have a capture card so I have been downloading the episodes off of e-mule. They come in mpeg format and are on average 215 mbs in size. I could burn them directly to cd and watch them, but I would like to clean them up a bit and get ride of as much noise as possible. I have read as many guides and how-tos as i could find about encoding cartoons and followed the instructions. I tried various filter combinations on virtualdub and played around with the settings on tmpeg, but with little luck. The episodes still come out blocky, and attempts to further reduce noise only makes them blurry, especially in wide shots. Being animated and monochrome is blockyness just unavoidable in vcd format, Would I be better off converting them to svcd? I have tried that a couple times but through enlarging they become blurry, and would really rather keep them as vcds for size and time reasons. Also, is thier any significnce in deinteracling and removing telecide, I don't really understand these two things but have read that it sould be applied when encoding cartoons. If anyone could give me advice, or a "how to" go about doing this I would very much apprecaite it, as i said I am faily new to this and still learning. But any information about virtualdub filters and tmpeg settings would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Aaron

MPEG INFORMATION
frame size: 352x240 (29.970 fps) 1149 kbs (what are I P B frames?)
SYSTEM INFORMATION
pentium 3, 996 MHz, 128 mb ram

[DEmberton]

The general rule is to always work with the highest quality source you can. Converting your MPGs to SVCD won't help because the quality has already been lost. There are a few filters for VirtualDub specifically for animation that sharpen the image, so you could try something like that in combination with a de-noising, but it's unlikely you're going to see a radical improvement.

Dave

[bbb]

VD FILTERING:
Smart Smoother HQ filter for VD works pretty well for cleaning up animated shows without excessive detail loss. Blur+Sharpen+unsharp mask may also be needed. In fact, animated shows are the exception and can sometimes be cleaned up by a great detail without much quality loss (especially if the cartoons don't have a lot of shading or small detail--most cartoons)
* Before you use VD filters, you might want to resize up to 720x480 to ensure that the filter won't overly smooth/blur out the details. Then resize back down to 352x240 before you encode to VCD.

TMPGENC ENCODING:
However, even after you clean up the noise/blocks from the downloaded mpeg, you should try to increase the bitrate when encoding your VCD. I never found 1150 to be enough to minimize blocks for VCDs. 1400-1500 bitrate for VCDs is much better.

VCD FORMAT:
And yes, stay with VCD format since the resolution for your downloaded files are already in VCD resolution so you won't gain any detail going to SVCD. In fact, if you make an SVCD out of these files it will look blockier since you need even higher bitrates (1500+) to handle the higher SVCD resolutions. Also, your SVCD won't look better since you received your files in VCD resolution and it will still appear like a VCD in terms of clarity (or lack thereof). SVCDs will only look better if your downloaded file is at SVCD resolution (480x480) or higher (640x480, 720x480).

[digitalmaster]

Go to www.kvcd.net and www.avisynth.org. Follow the guides on KVCD.NET. The avisynth filters really clean out the noise on a TV broadcast.