[MPlayer-users] PostProcess settings suggestions (VHS-captured video)?

[Steven M. Schultz]

Hi!

> From: emaillist+mpu at dogphilosophy.net
> I'm attempting to view (well, actually, export to mpeg2enc for re-encoding,
> but...) some videos that I've captured from VHS, and intend to generate VCD's
> from.

	Ah, so it sounds like you have the mjpegtools package installed.  Do
	you have the latest release (1.6.0)?

> The catch is that as seems to be usual for TV-capture, the picture is full
> of a lot of "color noise" that seriously degrades the final result
> once encoded to mpeg (i.e. flickering "speckles" of red, green, and blue - 
> a sort of "transparent, colored snow" effect superimposed on the

	Broadcast TV (at least in the US) is terribly noisy which doesn't help
	mpeg compression.   Then VHS is a low quality medium which further
	degrades the signal.   Getting watchable movies from that combination
	is difficult.

> Can anyone suggest a set of mplayer postprocessor settings that might
> blend in or reduce (or perhaps "despeckle"?) the "color noise" in
> the video?  

	Have you tried the yuvdenoise program that comes with mjpegtools?  It
	did absolute wonders for the 40 or 50 VHS tapes I encoded to SVCD/VCD.
	Oh, I also found out that VHS tapes do not age well (some were 15 years
	old or more) - to correct the contrast/color/etc I bought a Sima SCC
	(color corrector) unit which worked very well (cheap too - $100 as I
	recall).   Between the Sima unit and the yuvdenoise program I obtained
	watchable (they'll never be "great" of course since the sources were so
	poor) VCDs

> I'm hoping to get quite a few of my old VHS tapes re-encoded to VCD, so
> something like this would be quite helpful...

	That's what I did to one cabinet of tapes - got a couple more to do 
	eventually.   The laser discs I will do last, it'd be nice to save 
	those as DVDs but I haven't found any DVD software that doesn't require
	windoze.

	Cheers,
	Steven Schultz
	sms at 2bsd.com