Over the years, I've become familiar with how to rip and re-encode movies from blu-ray etc., especially since I've been running a Plex media server at home for several years now.

A couple years ago, I found out about a company called Topaz Labs, which makes AI-based photo and video editing software for doing things like upscaling photos and videos (filling in details so they look more clear than if they were enlarged with typical enlargement algorithms), removing noise from photos, etc. I've used their software on various photos and videos, and I've had some mixed results - It works best when the source is already fairly high quality (so that it has more details to work with). But when I get good results, I think it's fairly interesting. One time I wanted to enlarge one of my old digital photos that had a resolution of 1024x768. I tried doubling its size using their Gigapixel software, and compared it to what I'd get by enlarging it with a regular photo editor (IrfanView), and the one with Gigapixel was indeed more clear. Some results for videos with their Video Enhance AI have been similar.

It seems it's also possible now to increase the frame rate of videos to make the motion look smoother. I've seen some software that probably does a fairly basic job of this (such as the free Handbrake), but Topaz Video Enhance AI also has an AI model for increasing frame rate with AI (without upscaling it). I'm currently having my PC increase the frame rate of a video as well as upscale it to 4K (Animusic HD on blu-ray) - Its native frame rate is 29.97fps, and I'm trying to change it to 60fps to see what results I get. Several days ago I used Handbrake to increase the frame rate, and now I'm doing the same using Topaz Video Enhance AI (as well as upscaling those to 4K). It will be interesting to compare them to see how well Handbrake and the Topaz software increase frame rate of the video.

In the last several years, I've found the following software tools for doing video conversions and processing:

- Handbrake: A free software tool for transcoding video (re-encoding a video to another codec; it works for both the video and audio). Handbrake can also do things like reduce noise in the video, de-interlace video, etc. It seems Handbrake is available for multiple platforms: Windows, Linux, and Mac.
I've also seen another program that is basically a fork of Handbrake that tries to be even easier to use.

- StaxRip: Similar to Handbrake, this is a free program for transcoding video. I'd seen someone say its quality may be better than Handbrake.

- ffmpeg: This is a command-line program for video processing and transcoding etc. which seems to be able to do almost anything you'd want as far as video encoding. One thing I've used ffmpeg for is generating a video out of a series of photos, and also to change the playback speed of a video (and it can do a lot more).

- Topaz Labs tools: As mentioned above, they make software tools for upscaling photos and videos using AI, as well as reducing noise in photos, etc. As far as I can tell though, they only make their tools for Windows right now.

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