Which Software-Scaler Looks Best - Mencoder and FFmpeg settings

-There is an old but good test showing you all of mplayers software scalers and how they look in the same image, here. The numbers mean this, see the mplayer man page:

0 fast bilinear
1 bilinear
2 bicubic (gute Qualität) (Standard)
3 experimentell
4 nearest neighbour (schlechte Qualität)
5 area
6 luma bicubic / chroma bilinear
7 gauss
8 sincR
9 lanczos
10 natural bicubic spline

If you want to translate that into ffmpeg language, it looks like this:

fast_bilinear
bilinear
bicubic
experimental
neighbor
area
bicubic_bilinear
gauss
sinc
lanczos

Just add on of the above to -sws_flags in ffmpeg.

Happy transcoding!