What filters to use with SR?
In some cases some pre- and post-filtering can really help. For
example, if you deal with a strongly compressed MJPG video (which most
digital photocameras produce today in video mode) the video has
blockiness - divided into squares 8x8 pixels. There are some
deblocking filters that can improve quality of such video.
Another case is noisy video. Video Enhancer thinks of noise as a part
of picture and resizes the noise as well, making it more annoying. And
since in each frame the noise is different it makes harder to get
right information from other frames to resize current one. So
denoising filters can really help perform SR better.
All these filters need to be used before SR pass.
Sometimes applying sharpen filter after SR can improve visual quality.
Some filters, like deinterlacers and deblockers, must be used before super
resolution. Some, like denoising and color correction, should be used
before SR. And some, like sharpening, are worth using any time. When
you know what filters do, it's easy to decide their order. And
sometimes this is not obvious and only practice, trial and error can
tell what's best.
What codecs to use?
MSU codecs are lossless, that means decompressed video is identical to
the original one. Lossless compression cannot be very strong, so the
file size is so big. Also, MSU Lossless Video Codec is slow, it can't
play high resolution video in realtime. Its main purpose is maximum
lossless compression for storing.
For most tasks usually lossy video codecs are used. They compress much
better by taking out some detail, degrading video quality. They differ
by quality/compression ratio.
I think the best lossy video codec today is x264. It is an open source
implementation of H.264 video compression standard. But x264 itself
provides only compression, you need to have a decompressor either,
which can be found in ffdshow.
If this is too complicated, I recommend you to use MPEG4 codecs:
DivX and
XviD. They are both
implementations of MPEG4 standard, the first
one is commercial and the second one is free and open source.
