Better picture for mplayer-dvb

Hello list,

yesterday I tried different postprocessing filters on my dvb. I think I 
read all posts to this list concerning blockiness, the dvb card not 
liking bitrates higher then 5000 etc. In the beginning I thought my VDR 
was too slow for say lavc=2 (AMD 1700+), but after writing the mpegpes 
to disk an then replaying it the dvb still refused to play the movie 
fluently. So I think there's a bitrate barrier on the dvb card.

I think it should be possible to even get a good picture with lavc=5000 
if one uses postprocessing. But I didn't find the "cure" yet. Two 
things: I'm not sure which postprocessing filter(s) to use and where to 
place them in the -vop (respectfully -vf) list.

Until now I tried different combinations with pp=hb:a/vb:a/dr and 
changing the decoder to xvid using -xvidopts 
deblock-chroma:deblock-luma[:dr2]. Also I tried to change the sharpness 
of the bicubic scaler.
I placed the changes in mplayer.sh:



-vop 
pp=hb:a/vb:a/dr,$VOP:$NEW_FPS,expand=$NEW_X:$REAL_Y:-1:-1:1,scale=$NEW_X:${NEW_Y}:0:0:100

-vop 
$VOP:$NEW_FPS,pp=hb:a/vb:a/dr,expand=$NEW_X:$REAL_Y:-1:-1:1,scale=$NEW_X:${NEW_Y}:0:0:100

-vop -xvidopts deblock-chroma:deblock-luma[:dr2] 
$VOP:$NEW_FPS,expand=$NEW_X:$REAL_Y:-1:-1:1,scale=$NEW_X:${NEW_Y}:0:0:100

I think my VDR was too slow for the xvid codecs internal postprocessing :)

The problem is I don't really know which position in the -vop list (for 
pp=...) is the best. I read about postprocessing being placed best 
before YUV conversion. But I'm not sure what that is :) Maybe you can 
tell me where to place these options.

Another thing is, my friend still got a Windows system, a P3 700MHz, and 
when he plays DivX on his computer (on a normal monitor, no dvb 
hardware) the picture looks awesome: No blocks and, allthough he's got 
"slower" hardware, it never skips. On my laptop the picture isn't that 
perfect with mplayer. I don't have skips because it's a Pentium-M with 
1.4GHz and I use -vo xv, but it's far more blocky. My friend uses VLC on 
his Windows system btw.
I think having a postprocessing filter like that could even help with 
mplayer-dvb (before lavc=5000?), but I didn't find an equivalent yet. 
Are the same filters available for mplayer as they are for a Windows 
VLC? Where would you place postprocessing filter in the -vop list?

Thanks!

Sebastian