Smoothing an mpeg

[perdomot]

Hope someone knows how to do this. I bought some anime vcds but want to use a smoother to make it look better but don't want to re-encode and lose quality. Cany anyone tell me how to do this. I've ripped the DAT file and the mpeg from the vcd so I have both available to process them. Thanks.

[ZippyP.]

...use a smoother to make it look better but don't want to re-encode and lose quality.

Simply not possible, you have to re-encode.

[perdomot]

I was afraid of that. The movies come encoded with standard vcd settings but I use XVCD settings to get better results. If I encode at a higher bit rate, do you think that would help?

[W_Eagle]

If I encode at a higher bit rate, do you think that would help?

Probably not -- you cannot have anything better than your source. Most relayable answer - try a small portion on a CD-RW.

[CrustyCurmudgeon]

I've had some luck recoding VCD/MPEG1 to low compression, low distortion XviD AVIs with VirtualDub, using it's temporal smoother filter set to about a 4 level, then re-encoding to MPEG1. The temporal smoother seems to blend out the mpeg blockieness and preserve the edges, while reducing the horizontal/vertical line jittering and diagonal jaggies. The only downside is there is a slight ghost effect when there's an even light or dark colored background and an opposite shade object moves rapidly across it. I usually don't notice it unless I know to look for it.

[ZippyP.]

I've had some luck recoding VCD/MPEG1 to low compression, low distortion XviD AVIs with VirtualDub, using it's temporal smoother filter set to about a 4 level, then re-encoding to MPEG1.

Rather than compressing the video (to xvid or whatever) it's best to leave the video as uncompressed and frameserve directly from Vdub to your encoder. No large intermediate file and no compression loss. Here's a guide. 8)

[CrustyCurmudgeon]

On short clips I use HuffYUV, but since I have Win98 and FAT32 won't allow files larger than 4 gig, I have to use more compression than HuffYUV can be counted on for clips longer than about 15 minutes. That link to using VirtualDub as a frame server didn't seem to me to offer a solution... plus it looked pretty complicated. Is is the right link?


EDIT - Oops. I see how it is used with TMPGEnd to do the job... neat, though still a bit complicated, but I can see how that would be better for longer stuff.

[ZippyP.]

... plus it looked pretty complicated.

Once you have it set up for frameserving, which you only do once, it's a piece of cake. Give it a try!

[CrustyCurmudgeon]

OK.. I tried it and it does work very well. Thanks for the tip!

[ZippyP.]

You're welcome.