Yesterday I captured 1 1/2 hours of VHS footage using VirtualDub. I captured in XP using UYVY at 352x480 and Huffyuv and the default noise reduction setting. Once finished, I ran through it again applying filters in the following order. 0 Transform (cropped bottom 9 lines of VHS noise), Resize using Precise Bilinear to 352x240, and finally Unsharp Mask - radius 3, strength 15. I used Huffyuv again and the result is a very nice clean sharp image having that "square pixel" look to it.

Next was to encode to vcd, xvcd or divx 4.11. I tried all three and was suprised by one "quality" shared by all when palying back. The sharpness was dramatically reduced in all cases. Where edges were sharply defined before, they now appear smoothened and blurry.

I've been encoding for some time, but this effect still puzzles me. I have played with unsharp mask filters, TMPGEnc's sharpen edge filter, but when applied to strongly they only add noise. When not enough strength is applied, the image remains smoothed. At one point I thought I had a solution to this, but for the life of me I can't remember what I did.

An example of how a vcd can remain sharp, go to: http://people.freenet.de/codecpage/VCD-experiments.html

Can anyone help steer me in the right direction with this?

Thanks in advance, Brad