A bit limited in test scope (single movie, only a few frames looked at),
and very subjective (my opinions may vary from yours as to what's good or not) BUT..
I've spent most of today doing tests on -sws,
to see what's good, and what's slow.
First my ini:
of=rawvideo=1
ovc=lavc=1
nosound=1
sws=6
lavcopts=vcodec=mpeg1video:vhq=1:vmax_b_frames=2:
vrc_minrate=300:vrc_maxrate=1850:vratetol=1000:vrc _buf_size=327:
vqmin=2:vqmax=24:lmin=1.5:vb_qfactor=1.2:vi_qfacto r=0.8:vqblur=0.3:
keyint=15:aspect=4/3:naq=1:intra_matrix=8,9,12,22,26,27,29,34,9,10,14 ,26,27,29,34,37,12,14,18,27,29,34,37,38,22,26,27,3 1,36,37,38,40,26,27,29,36,39,38,40,48,27,29,34,37, 38,40,48,58,29,34,37,38,40,48,58,69,34,37,38,40,48 ,58,69,79:
inter_matrix=16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,18,20,22,24,2 6,28,30,32,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,22,24,26,30,32, 32,34,36,24,26,28,32,34,34,36,38,26,28,30,32,34,36 ,38,40,28,30,32,34,36,38,42,42,30,32,34,36,38,40,4 2,44
vf=scale=352:288
ofps=25
It's (k)vcd, and it runs at 20 fps roughly.
Produces files 10 megs (I'm after 13 megs).
The Results:
0 fast bilinear (default) - average quality
1 bilinear - very nice, fast, almost as good as 2
2 bicubic (good quality) - nicer than experimental, seems a little bit sharp tho
3 experimental - seems extremely good, strange colour blotches tho (only noticeable in 300x zoom)
4 nearest neighbour (bad quality) - yes bad
5 area - a bit fuzzy
6 luma bicubic / chroma bilinear - beautiful but causes some colour bleed (eg face into shirt) (only noticeable in 300x zoom)
7 gauss - very nice also removes single dots, maybe too blurred?
8 sincR - slow (half 1-5) harsh buggers colour up (greenish tone)
9 lanczos - nices sharp without extra artifact blocks
10 bicubic spline - increases macroblocking, not as good as lanc or bicubic
Results: use in this order 9, 2, 6, 10, 7
6 is actually very nice, and 3 (experimental) is brilliant on some movies..
<an aside> what can I change in the ini to improve the picture (and increase file size up to the 13 mb??