Deblocking CBR video

[wlndd6]

Is there a deblocker that takes the CBR nature of broadcast MPEG-2 (17.4 mbps 1080i) into account?

That, for example, would not do anything at all when there is little/no movement. And only deblock when there is motion, in which case it would deblock areas of intense motion much more strongly than areas of less intense motion.

[Dark Shikari]

What you want is a deblocker that is quantizer-aware; anything in mplayer that is QP-adaptive (like SPP or libpostproc stuff) should do the trick.

[Ghitulescu]

I assume your MPEG-2 1080i stream comes from US stations, as in Europe they'll use MPEG-4.
However, 17Mbps MPEG-2 is not that bad, it should be at the comparative level of a little above average DVD, mutatis mutandis. JVC HD-GZ7 shoots MPEG-2 CBR at 19Mbps and reports are its footage is not that bad as you describe to be your samples.

While broadcasters need to have CBR if they feed the streams to a transponder, most broadcasters in EU do encode VBR, but add "fillers" to obtain a "CBR" stream. One can discard those "fillers" by eg repacking the .M2TS/.TS file into MKV. If the bitrate remains constant after repacking, then you have a real CBR stream, if not, then you have a VBR.

I think Mpeg2source can also do a quantizer-based deblocking.

[TheFluff]

Yes, mpeg2source can do quantizer-based deblocking (the parameter is called "cpu" for historical reasons), and so can FFVideoSource, although I don't recommend the latter for MPEG TS/PS streams.

[wlndd6]

Thanks for the replies. I tried the mpeg2source deblocker but wasn't that happy - it still destroyed a lot of details when there was little motion/blocks.