How to resize mpg files with FFMPEG with minimum visual artifacts?

I have a mpg file that is 1920x360 in size. I am trying to resize it to 3840x576. My computer has a intel core i5 processor. I tried the command "ffmpeg -i input.mpg -vf scale=3840x576 output.mpg", but the output has lots of visual artifacts though the input has no visual artifacts at all. What is the FFMPEG command to achieve this while minimizing the amount of visual artifacts?

Solution 1:

I'm not sure why you want to do this at all, as you won't get any higher resolution or picture quality from a source that has lower resolution than the target. The best case would be that the visual quality will not become much worse.

If you still want to do it for whatever reason, you can try:

ffmpeg -i input.mpg -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -s 3840x720 -c:a aac output.mp4

(maybe with -vf scale= option instead of -s I'm not sure if it makes any difference)

Anyway you need to specify some reasonable codec and quality setting if you don't want the output to look much worse.

For H264 these settings are explained here more detailed: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264