Since patents on mpeg2
have now expired I expected a renewed interest in this free codec.
Curiously, despite the age, still mpeg2 video encoding offers many free alternatives to pick: x262, HCenc, ffmpeg and, if you have a recent intel cpu, qsv encoding (through ffmpeg as well). And all them can run cross platform (HCenc runs smoothly under linux using wine).
It would be great to see a great, comprehensive comparison (speed-wise, quality-wise, feature-wise) among them all.