Improve video quality - Advice please!

[SHMDMBP]

Hi,
The question that I have may be something not new, but I am really in need of the some advice. I have a very important video file that's being converted to VCD from DV. Unfortunately I don't have the DV source and now I want to enhance the quality of this video which is in VCD format by any possible chance. Please advise if you have used any hardware or unlikely software which does what I'm looking for. Cost does not really matter as the video is very important for me.
Thanks in advance
Brian

Hardwares I Use:
MBP 17"
2.16ghz
100GB 7200rpm
2GB Ram
Desktop PC
P4 3.6ghz
320GB 7200rpm
1.5GB Ram
:)

[OptimismPrime]

VCD uses MPEG1, wich is a 1991 Standard tailored to 2x CD-Rom Drive Speed Datarates, so about 1.5 MBit/s and decodeable on a Pentium 1, 133 Mhz.

It CAN typicaly only achive about VHS quality, but most of the time doesn't because ppl use cheap "1-click-done" tools that encode, but by no means do this well.

This often results in blocky artefacts whenever there is fast movement and/or high detail in certain areas of the picture.

Improving the Imagequality of such material is very complicated, and mostly fruitless.

If the image indeed is blocky, there are ways to smoothen out these pixelblock edges to make them less visible, but even the best adaptive filters will also blur the rest of the image.
If the image already apears pretty washed out and blury, then that is what has already been tried and trying to enhance the sharpness will only marginaly help things but mostly produce flickering pixels around any kind of edge or hard color contrast alongside the sharpening.

There is realy no way to realy enhance VideoCD quality to anything noticeably better, only to something noticeably bad in a different kind of way.

I guess if you can't get hold of whoever has the original DV Material, or at least a higher quality, other kind of format, then whatever has been lost in the process of converting to VCD, is lost forever