Common plugins

[ZionDK]

I've recently started to encode some music videos VOB -> x264, but I'm not familiar with all the plugins. So far I've only used LimitedSharpenFaster and RemoveGrain. I can imagine that I'm going to stumble on some videos that's going to give me problems like blocking and such.

Do you know of simple plugins that can be helpful to these simple encodes? Any good articles?

[unskinnyboy]

You are not going to get answers to vague questions like that here. Start reading (http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page) for yourself.

[Sagekilla]

Since video can be so varied, there's no general hard and fast rule for that. Typically I follow a preprocess only if necessary philosophy, aka "If it aint broke, don't fix it." I don't sharpen when unnecessary as it can introduce haloing artifacts, and I don't degrain unless I need to, but this tends to be something I deal with using another script (See the thread on degraining 300.)

Point is, depending on what your source is, you may or may not need to do some kind of filtering on it. Keep encoding your videos and keep an eye out for any artifacts that slip through, if something appears, look up what it is and see how to fix it. That's how I did it, and it's not that hard for anyone to do.

[Fizick]

for de-blocking try read doc of MPEG2source (DGdecode package)
probably you have it.

[kumi]

Don't forget that x264 has deblocking as well :p

[themostestultimategenius]

GradFun2DB (http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/files/gradfun2db_25_dll_20060315.zip) is a very useful filter =)

[Terranigma]

GradFun2DB (http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/files/gradfun2db_25_dll_20060315.zip) is a very useful filter =)

Post-processing only, sure, but pre-processing? You're betting off creating your own function, one that deblocks both luma/chroma (if needed be) for deblocking, and a noise/grain function that masks dark areas (after filtering of course).
A tweakable grain function would suffice better, one that doesn't add too much, especially in unwanted areas, blowing up the file size (and masking fine detail.)

[kumi]

I seldom use it, but when I need to remove edge-enhancement, DeHalo_alpha() does the job splendidly.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=738264#post738264