How to increase the Resolution of an .AVI file

[Major_Striker]

Okay, so I've got an entire collection of movies in .avi format that my friend gave to me when he moved out of state. I want to make some of them into VCDs, unfortunately the resolution isn't very good. Is there any way to upgrade these poor quality movies? Perhaps some software tool that could help me out?

[Major_Striker]

Anyone?

[Mirror_Image]

You can't improve the quality of the video much at all. Others may explain why, but you aren't going to be able to improve them to any appreciable degree. Bad source = bad end product.

[PhArAoH]

Increasing resolution IMO has the opposite effect. If you increase the resolution of that's say 352:288 video to 400:576 your final video will
not gain any quality. It would just make your file larger and would look much worse on TV or PC screen. The only thing you can do is to use a video editing program to add filters to the video and save to a new video at the same resolution.

[Mirror_Image]

Think of it like this:

If you have a shabby-looking still image or a low-quality audio file, you can work on them all day with tools such as Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro (images) or SoundForge/CoolEdit (audio) and you can make them look/sound different (contrast and color adjustment, artificial stereo and reverb, ad infinitum, ad nauseaum), but you really can't get back what has been discarded. If the movie was encoded in a way that made it look worse, in order to save encoding time or disk space, you "can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear". Besides DivX (I assume the AVIs are DivX) is a "lossy" compressed format. Every time you re-encode it, you lose information.

[TerryToonz]

In other words

"you can't polish a turd"

[Major_Striker]

Well, you can, but I wouldn't advise it... Thanks for your help, guys. I'm not sure what I'll do but at least I now know I can't upgrade it any.