How to force MeGUI to use ffdshow's decoder?

[Crayon Shin Chan]

I really like ffdshow's cubic interpolation deinterlacing filter, but so far MeGUI and Virtualdub refuse to use ffdshow as a video decoder, with Virtualdub not using the VFW equivalent. The only time ffdshow's decoder (and thus filter) gets used is when I play the video in Media Player Classic. Any solutions?

[Zoomastigophora]

MeGUI is an x264 front end and VirtualDub is meant for capture and processing video, which also means it can encode. Point being, they're both meant to encode video, not decode. If you need to deinterlace the video as part of the encode process, you need look into AviSynth and the various filters it includes/supports. For deinterlacing, I would suggest NNEDI. Alternatively, there are various GUI based encoders like Handbrake that can do it for you.

[Crayon Shin Chan]

Yeah, but you have to understand, in order to encode the video, they must first decode it so they can reencode it. Make sense?

Anyway I found what I needed - the ffdshow() Avisynth plugin is included with the ffdshow tryouts package once you tick the appropriate checkbox during installation. It basically puts any preset combination of ffdshow filters into the Avisynth pipeline, without using ffdshow for decoding.

[Zoomastigophora]

Yeah, but you have to understand, in order to encode the video, they must first decode it so they can reencode it. Make sense?

Yea, sorry, I got thrown off when you said you wanted to use ffdshow's decode filters as part of MeGUI and VirtualDub. I just jumped to the conclusion that you were misunderstanding what their roles were. Out of curiosity, why do you like ffdshow's cubic interpolation deinterlace instead of some of the more used deinterlace filters like NNEDI?

[Crayon Shin Chan]

The name sounded simple and it worked amazingly well, given its simple name and proximity to "Bypass", which is a presumably even simpler algorithm at the top of the dropdown box. I use Yadif now that I saw that it has SSSE3 optimizations and the like and produces a similar result, but it seems the main limitation is the x264 encoder, so I haven't seen a speed increase.

[madlemming]

A more generic way to do things like this is to build the filter chain manually in graphedit, force the inclusion of ffdshow; then use avisynth to open that .grf file.