Rather than encode the entire video to try different settings, you can select a range with DGIndex (Drag the position slider forward and click the [ button, then press F5 or F6 to play for ten or so seconds to make sure you have something like a camera pan within your selection, then click the ] button). I'd start with Kernel deinterlace if you haven't already tried it.

When testing settings with a sample, you could for example use a one-minute selection, then divide your original desired output by 90 and use that. It would give you the same resulting bitrate as if you'd encoded the entire file, and in six minutes instead of ten hours.

I have just noticed the most bizarre thing ever.. Suddenly, most of the artifacts disappeared. Well, theyre present in particular places, but its not bad over the majority of the movie. You can imagine my surprise at that. Well, a bit more investigation, and I realised it was my hdtv software that was running consecutively.. apparently it was messing with the overlay and fixing the issue. Hdtv software was playing live tv whilst I was viewing my encoding in media player classis. I close the hdtv player software and all of a sudden my encode looks ugly again. Ive tried using xvid1, libavcodec and divx to decode them, they all have issues unless the hdtv software is running. divx was tried with post processing on/off. I may have to try visit a friends and see what things look like on his hardware player. Very strange.

I have uploaded a 3mb avi sample to If you view that, and the problems are not very obvious and very ugly, then perhaps there is some sort of problem with my pc. I work on a basis of not installing codecs at random (and especially not crazy codec packs like nemo etc!), I have installed the GK codec pack, vp62 and indeo, and the ogg/mkv containers... so having conflicts would be surprising. Perhaps there is something I am not thinking of.