Method and system for removing artifacts, such as blocking noise and contouring effects, from a block-encoded video signal. One method for removing blocking artifacts includes but is not limited to decoding the block-encoded signal to obtain a decoded sequence of video frames and one or more associated motion vectors. By using the motion vector, the location of one or more blocking artifacts may be identified within at least one of the frames. The location identified by the motion vector is filtered to remove at least some of the blocking artifacts. Another method for removing contouring effects comprises decoding the block-encoded signal to obtain a decoded sequence of video frames, detecting a contouring effect by evaluating the macroblock mode and DCT coefficient information from the decoded signal, and filtering one or more blocks correlating to the detected contouring effect.