It's possible that Premiere's AVI format is so propriatary that other programs (eg virtualdub) blow up after accessing it for a while. Are there free or pay-for 'standard' MPEG4 plugins I could download?

And apart from bbMpeg, are there other free or low-cost MPEG2 encoders I could try? As much as Premiere has its abilities, I prefer tweaking the video quality with VirtualDub. Would it even be worthwhile doing a convert from propriatary AVI to standard MPEG2 then to MPEG4?

(I checked the MPEG capability in Premiere, there is no capability apart from Pinnacle's propriatary one. I tried LSX, which is okay but too expensive... unless its quality for MPEG2 is really good, which I gather it isn't...)

Thanks much!