Pretty much since I bought my Easycap 2.0, something has been bothering me. 
 
The more video savvy folks on GiantBomb may know what the image to the left is. It's the Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts demo, straight off my capture device. Standard-Definition video is interlaced - which is a fancy term meaning that the lines of pixels that make up an image are divided in to two groups: "Even" and "Odd". As the video displays on screen, the "Even" group will update first and then the "Odd" group will update after that, and they alternate back and forth to create a moving picture. Because most Standard-Definition TVs are naturally blurry, and the lines update so quickly, you don't even notice they're there. It's also probably worth mentioning that High-Definition footage doesn't have any of this stuff (but high-def capture devices are $100-$250). When you transfer video to the computer, it's typically a good idea to apply de-interlacing so that you get a solid image. There are a very large number of ways to de-interlace video footage on your computer and which method of de-interlacing you want to use will vary based on what your source footage is from.
 
The most popular de-interlacing method, as far as I can tell, is "Blended" de-interlacing, which takes the two lines and blends them together to create one image. For videogame footage this is terrible, as it creates a blurry mess. The only other way I could de-interlace game footage was to use something called the "Duplicate Field" method, which basically ignores a line of interlacing and gives you a crisp, clear image. Even that, however, was not ideal - because that meant that while the signal coming from my capture device was 640x480, I was only using 640x240. This meant that for some of the more detail-oriented games or games with small text, "Duplicate Field" de-interlacing would often mangle the video in bad ways. But, it was my only option. You see, my Easycap is cheap - and because of that, the people who manufactured it cut a couple of corners in the video processing portion of the device. If I tried to use any of the other de-interlacing methods available, I would run in to a big fat problem.
 


Take a close look at that image. Do you notice anything strange about it? Pay close attention to the colors. My Easycap used a lazy way of interlacing video that messes with the color data the video contains. If I used any of the so-called "Smart De-interlacing" plugins to clean up my video, I would run in to the above problem where all the color for the video frame would lag behind the actual image itself. This was a shame - VirtualDub's "Smart De-interlacing" plugins dynamically detect which areas of a video frame have interlacing artifacts and use a variety of processing algorithms to ensure the highest quality video output. And I couldn't use any of them. The problem annoyed me for months on end and I was constantly messing with settings and trying new de-interlacing plugins in an attempt to find something that compensated for my cheap little Easycap. I found nothing.
 
Eventually, I ended up posting about it on the VirtualDub forums - and in hindsight, I probably should have gone there first. Within minutes, somebody told me about a specific plugin geared toward this sort of thing that applied an effect known as "Reverse Field Dominance". That, when applied with an "Area Based" Smart De-interlacing plugin, produced the results I had spent months trying to figure out:

Hooray for the internet!