Best way to reencode mpeg2 to lower bitrate

[justcurious]

Hi all.

i am currently capturing some 8mm tapes for a friend whos camcorder stopped working but the only camcorder i have access to only has composite out, so not wanting to spend a fortune for a capture card on this pc i went with a USB capture dongle.
To be fair it does a pretty good job but the only problem i have is i can not adjust the capture bitrate for the mpeg2, which by default is around 8000 kbps. most of the tapes will be small enough to fit straight onto a single layer dvd but a couple are around 5gig.

which would be the best way to reduce these files, i know best is subjective and i would like to not start learning avisynth.

ATM i reincode with avidemux to a lower bitrate then author to dvd, would it be better to author to dvd then shrink it with dvdrebuilder? or use something else to reduce the bitrate?

alan

[Baldrick]

Reconvert with hcenc using avstodvd. It can output as mpeg2 or a dvd directly.

[jagabo]

Author the 5GB files to a dual layer DVD image. Then use DVDShrink to shrink them down to fit on a single layer DVD.

[justcurious]

Thanks to both of you, i will check both ways and see if i can notice any difference.