any despeckle filters for MPEG2?

[bsmith1051]

BACKGROUND
I have about 2 dozen old home movies that I painstakingly recorded to MPEG2 (and DVD-R) as a Christmas present to the family. I used my new AIW 9700 with the default "DVD" preset and now I think the bitrate (10M cbr) is too high. So I'm preparing to re-encode them all, to reduce the bitrate and, hopefully, to apply a despeckle filter. My AIW has such a filter but I think it's only usable during the original digitizing (oops!).

Is there any way to apply despeckle to the MPEG2 after the fact?

WHAT SOFTWARE I'VE TRIED
I looked at the ATI MMC s/w but didn't see any option for this. I didn't see any filters in the bundled Pinnacle Studio 8 SE either. I checked TMPGenc but didn't see any way to add to it's built-in set of filters. I also bought a copy of Roxio VideoWave 5 Platinum but it, too, doesn't feature any filters. Finally, I have an "old" copy of Adobe Premiere 6.0 that was too complicated for me and which I haven't touched in years (it's not even installed anymore).

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[manyk]

Have you tried burning a test to DVD-RW? Because a lot of the time you will notice noise when viewed on you computer monitor, but not on your TV.

With regard to TMPGenc, I would suggest using the noise reduction filter. But don't go too high on the settings. I believe I got the settings from LordSmurf's website which are no more than 40-1-40. If you go too high the image will appear blurry on your PC, and when it's blurring on the PC it's even worse on the TV.