How to clean up old animated footage?

Question

Recently I ripped a couple of old DVD's to preserve them. The original rip has a resolution of 720*576 and runs with 5100kb/s on 25fps interlaced. I tinkered around with Handbrake and (hopefully) found the best settings. The final file is a fifth of the size and runs progressively on 1000kb/s.

EDIT: Using h.265 NVENC

Getting to my question now. In the final product, there are a lot of colour artefacts in solid coloured planes. Is there any way to i.e. detect the mean colour in a similar coloured plane and colour the whole plane like it?

Answer 1

The artifacts are on the original footage because a DVD used some oldie MP2 codec, you need to live with it.

You could try using a denoiser, some of them can detect compression artifacts. I am not spamming or anything, but take a look at Neat Video Denoiser.

Answer 2

If you see artifacts in your footage, it is most likely that the bitrate is too low. Try encoding with the h264 or libx264 codec at around 5 mb/s

Answer 3

It could be that you are looking for a filter chain more than a particular codec. See for example: https://www.engon.de/audio/vhs4_en.htm#cartoon_vhs