MPEG2 to SVCD MPEG2?

[otakucode]

I'm working with some video I pulled off my recently hacked Tivo, and its in great quality but at an extremely high bitrate. The only thing I need to do is downsample this bitrate and maybe deinterlace it (altho since I play this back on a TV I haven't noticed any artifacts when I've left it interlaced). I've tried 3 different tests with TMPEGEnc, one with Motion search estimate interlaced CQ 100%, #2 with motion search estimate non-interlace CQ 100%, #3 with High quality motion search non-interlace 2-pass VBR. All 3 look like CRAP. I expected the first 2 to look bad, but the third one is not much better than 1 or 2! I tried Adobe Premiere initially but for some reason I can't figure out, the output is astonishingly jerky... like 1 frame every second or so. What I would really like to do is get this into CinemaCraft Encoder SP 2.5. I've tried using an AVISynth script containing:
DirectShowSource("pokerpreproc.mpg"
and I've tried frameserving from VirtualDub, loading the VDR into CCE. Both attempts crashed CCE. I'm at a loss at this point, I want to get some non-crap output, the original MPEG-2 file is completely SVCD compliant except for the bitrate. Any suggestions welcomed.

Thanks in advance,
OtakuCODE

[Pko]

Try this

1) process original stream with DVD2AVI so you get a file.d2v file and a file.mp2 audio file. Take into account if the audio has any desynchronization (the name D2A gives to the file will tell)

2) expand the file.mp2 to file.wav with, i.e., Winamp

3) use this script:

# use correct paths to the DLLs and audio/video files
loadplugin("decomb.dll")
loadplugin("mpeg2dec.dll")
Video=FieldDeinterlace(mpeg2source("file.d2v"))
Audio=WavSource("file.wav")
# Use DelayAudio() if appropriate
AudioDub(Video,Audio)

Then process that .avs with CCE or TMPGEnc as progressive (that is, non-interlaced).

It should look OK