transcoding m2v

[DDie]

My father got a cheap DVB card which can record the captured signal directly to an .m2v video-file and .mp2 (or .ac3) for audio.

I'd like to compress the .m2v file. The problem I now got to is that none of the programs I found on my hd could handle m2v files except tmpeg. But tmpeg can only produce mpeg2 files and that is not what I desire. Then I thought I could create a DVD mpeg2 file using tmpeg. I chose a bitrate of 8000kpbs (cbr) but the result was horrible. The file I used for this test was a passage of James Bond - The Living Daylights which is in panavision (2.35:1); so the upper and lower part of the picture consists of black as it is sent in 4:3. But this black wasn't black any more after recompressing it with tmpeg. It became grey and there were tons of new artifacts (yes, at 8000kbps). So tmpeg is not an option.

Is there a way to directly transcode the .m2v file to an .avi?

regards

DDie

[timecop]

use virtualdubmod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net) as it has native mpeg2 support. That will open m2v for you, and you can encode.
Of course it will most likely require more processing than that (deinterlace, etc). In that case, get DVD2AVI, Mpeg2Dec3 and decomb avisynth plugins, and load m2v that way.

[DDie]

thx!:)

[SeeMoreDigital]

If you can't get your head around VirtualDubMod you could give MPEGmediator a go: -

http://www.mpegmediator.com/

It's very simple to use and gives good results if you want to encode to DivX, XviD or WMV9 VCM!

Cheers

[echooff]

Try ReJig. Do a search of the forum for it. Works great but only on the video portion at this time.