Can I improve quality from MPEG-1 source?

[funkhouse]

All that remains is an MPEG-1 source (actual specs I'll provide if needed) ... original capture came from several analog video cameras years ago and source no longer available.

The MPEG-1 source translates to VCD, and plays back on entertainment center ... video quality mediocre, audio fine.

Any suggestions on what may be done in an effort to improve the video playback? Or am I xxxx out of luck?!

[Treebeard]

your pretty much out of luck. any re-encoding would not make it better. quality does (slightly) degrade with each re-encode.

[funkhouse]

thanks for the input, that WOULD (question) imply that converting to MPEG-2 in an effort to build a Svcd, would add no value and in contrast, waste a bunch of time as well as storage?

[Treebeard]

yes you would waste your time. encoding to svcd would actually make it look worse b/c the resolution would be greater and it would just stretch the existing faults in the movie.

[funkhouse]

thanks!

[Thorn]

Some people have good results with some media with filtering, but filters can often make the quality worse. I've filtered less lately (especially with digital sources, including DV) but I filtered a lot from VHS sources that I captured to huffyuv. You can try filtering the file in virtualdub and then frameserve back to TMPGenc to re-encode back to svcd or whatever. There probably isn't much that you can do though... the main things you can fix with filtering are mosquito noise, color distortions, and slight vertical/horizontal distortions. Mpeg artifacts are essentially there for good.