Anime4K

Why we included this project

Anime4K is a practical pick if you watch anime on a 4K screen and want 1080p content to look sharper without re-encoding the source. It ships GLSL shaders that run inside common media players, including mpv, IINA, and Plex, so the upscaling happens live during playback rather than as a slow offline batch job. The project is tuned for native 1080p anime and offers modular pieces for line-art upscaling, deblurring, denoising, and cleanup of resampling artifacts, so you can adjust the pipeline to fit a particular show or your own taste. It also works as a reference for how CNN-based super-resolution can run fast enough for real-time use, and other projects have ported it to C++, Rust, Metal, and WebGPU. If you are building your own video enhancement pipeline, the shader implementations and the documented speed-versus-quality trade-offs are worth a close look.