AVI to best output for WDTV

[wdtviscool]

I'm currently transferring my videos from my Sony HDV HDR-HC3 camera using MovieMaker. MovieMake produces a bunch of AVI files and tagged with the date taken (very cool).

Problem is WDTV won't play this AVI file so I have to re-encode. The quality of the AVI is excellent. So I would like preserve the quality with ZERO loss in quality (if that is even possible) during the re-encoding. I'm willing to spend the time and deal with the huge file.

Video Codec: Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, VC-1
Audio: MPEG Audio, PCM, Dolby Digital, DTS

What codec is best? What tools are available? These are videos so mainly quality is my primary goal. Any recommendation would be much appreciated.

[rumplestiltskin]

What are the exact specs of the file produced by MovieMaker? (bitrate, etc.)

[wdtviscool]

Video:
Frame width: 720
Frame height: 480
Data rate: 29302 kbps
Total bitrate: 30326 kbps
Frame rate: 29 frames/second

Audio:
Bit rate: 1024 kbps
Channels: 2 (stereo)
Audio sample rate: 32 kHz

Ops previous typo: These are videos of my kids so maintaining quality is primary goal.

Is that enough info? That's all I see from properties of a file.

Thanks for your time.

[rumplestiltskin]

I suspect the bitrate may be the problem. I use about 2500 kbps for my AppleTV (encoding in H264). If you utilize something like MPEG Streamclip to re-encode as MPEG4 (H264, 100% quality, 160kbps audio), you may find the quality is just fine. If you want to go with a higher video bitrate, that's fine but I'll suggest you try encoding a minute of video at various settings until you find one that does the trick without an excessive bitrate. (MPEG Streamclip will let you set in/out points for such a short test.) Let us know what happens.