Any good freeware MPEG re-encoders out there?

[Jeff7]

I did a search on this at the forums here, didn't find any relevant threads, just so you all know.
I'm trying to convert some 8Mbit/sec MPEG2 files to something a little smaller. I used Vidomi to make DivX files, but they keep giving me frozen frames sometimes, plus they can't seem to play on anything less than maybe a 900MHz T-bird processor. A733MHz T-bird system yields quite a few dropped frames when playing back the files; the Task manager (WinXP) says that the processor usage to decode the Divx file is around 90%, just for a 450x307 (approx) 2000bps video.
So anyway, it seems that Divx is being unkind to me. I've seen things like Family Guy and Futurama MPEG files, at around 220MB each, and they have decent quality, so I'm looking for something to encode my MPEG2 files as MPEG1 (I'm guessing) files. I've checked out Doom9.org's utilities for MPEG encoding, but those programs tend to have serious problems - severe memory leaks, lack of support for popular codecs, and crashes whenever I try to open or encode a file.

 

[NEVERwinter]

mmm..... try TMPGENC... it allows mpeg2 encoding for 30 days trial, or try VirtualDub to encode it to DivX

yea, i had a similar file, it must be played on a min 1GHz CPUs

you may want to go Here

 

[Gooberlx2]

goto doom9's website and look at the divx guides. You can use DVD2AVI to convert mpeg2 streams to a dvd2avi project to be loaded into gordian-knot. it will also convert the audio to a .mp2 files which can be converted into mp3 with headAc3he. pretty much all you need to know is on doom9's site, and it's pretty easy.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I am aware that you mentioned you'd already been to doom9's site, but that's the exact process i used to take a very nice quality anime mpeg2 svcd (2 cds) and made it into a very nice quality divx 5.02 (1 cd).

Oh and also look at the svcd->divx converting guide. DVD2AVI, headac3he, and g-knot have been very reliable for me.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: NEVERwinter
mmm..... try TMPGENC... it allows mpeg2 encoding for 30 days trial, or try VirtualDub to encode it to DivX

Strange; even though the software itself says it supports MPEG2, TMPGENC can't seem open the files I recorded with my WinTV-PVR card, and they are MPEG2.

i had a similar file, it must be played on a min 1GHz CPUs

Yeah, I can even play these Futurama episodes on a 450MHz K6-3 processor, and they look just as jumpy (not bad, but a little) as the DivX on the 733 T-bird.
I'll check out that VCHhelp.com site in the meantime.

Oh, and another mini-rant, about Vidomi - has a pretty good featureset, but it too is crash prone - after encoding 3 or 4 files, it just closes itself. Sure is better than maybe 6 months ago, when I had a less-capable TV tuner that only recorded AVI's - Vidomi would crash after just being open for awhile - I could run it, and just let it sit there, and it would crash.

 

[Dre]

If you downloaded a newer version of TMPGEnc, it requires that you use a certain retail MPEG2 codec. PowerDVD is one of them. You'll need to find an older version.