M-Filter and blockiness

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I'm interested in buying the Darim M-Filter standalone model. I usually convert my vhs tapes to vcd by using the PV231 mpeg encoder card. The resultant vcd's are okay but are usually blocky. I get better results if I capture the video with my Pinnacle DV500 Plus and convert the avi file to vcd with TMPGEnc. As everyone knows, this would take longer. I know that it is not possible to remove all the blocks in a vcd. But has everyone had any good results preprocessing the video with the M-Filter and then sending the video to the mpeg encoder card? I've searched this forum and did not find a satisfactory answer. I do not want to spend $900 and afterwards find out that the vcds are as blocky with or without filtering.

-- Joseph Tsai (tsaijk@charter.net), March 20, 2002

Answers

VHS tape to VCD does not produce good results with any method. I usually convert them to XVCD (high bit rate) to get acceptable results.

Instead of waisting 900$ on a hardware filter, I would spend that money on a consumer DVD recorder (which cost less than 900$ at this time). Quality is definitely better with DVD (but remember quality of the source video is still the upper limit).

So, spend your money wisely.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), March 21, 2002.


I'm told the M filter does remove blockiness because it is after all a noise filter but the picture also becomes less sharp. In my opinion the noise on VHS tapes is only one of the factors that produce blockiness because even if the noise filter is NOT used TMPGenc still creates exemplary MPEGs from AVIs captured from VHS.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), March 23, 2002.

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