Re-encode 720p14 h.264 MP4 to 480i29.97 MPEG-2?

[miamicanes]

correction: I just checked it with Videolan... it's 14.985008fps (exactly half of 29.97), so it looks like temporal rate correction won't be a problem after all. Anyway...

I have a few gigabytes of downloaded web videos that are officially described as "Quicktime", but have .mp4 extensions and are identified by Windows Media Player as 14fps 1280x720 h.264.

I want to re-encode them as 29.97fps 720x480 16:9 MPEG-2 that's compliant with Blu-Ray. I'm looking for suggestions for one or more apps to use to achieve this.

I don't actually care about space-efficiency... they're actually going to be dumped onto a 2tb hard drive for playback on a Seagate FreeAgent TheaterHD. I just know that the FAT's MPEG-2 limits are basically the same as Blu-Ray's.

I don't need to do authoring or editing, just (hopefully) straightforward transcoding. I have to transcode to MPEG-2 because the FAT can't deal with h.264 (only the FAT+ can), and I might as well downsample it to 480i because the TV it's attached to is SD and connected via S-video anyway (hence, my decision to buy the FAT instead of the FAT+... the 'plus' lacks s-video output).

I'd prefer something I can script, so I can just start it before I go to bed/work, let it run while I'm gone, and stop it (preferably non-destructively) whenever I need to actually use my computer. It's been about 3 years since I've done anything video-related, so I suspect everything I knew back then is now obsolete.

I'm not averse to spending up to $50 on something that will make the job painless, quick, and reliable... but I have a hunch that there's probably free software that will do a better job than anything in that price range.

update: it looks like TmpgEnc2.x has gotten several orders of magnitude cheaper than I remember it being back when I used to use it circa 2002 to re-encode ripped DVDs for SVCDs. Unfortunately, TmpgEnc4 is a little more than I can really justify spending on this project. Can 2.5 deal with h.264 input?

[miamicanes]

Update: I downloaded the trial version of TMPGenc2.5, but I can't get it to accept the .mp4 file as input. It appears that I need a DLL named MP4FileLibU.dll that's not included with Windows 7 (or at least not the 64-bit version).

I also tried installing ffdshow-tryout, but TMPGENC2.5 appears to be oblivious to its existence.

[classfour]

TMPGenc 2.5 - takes .avi files, right? mp4 may be seen as an incorrect container.

[miamicanes]

Probably. I remember that there's some way involving frameserving and/or vfw to make just about anything look like something Tmpgenc will deal with, but it's been so long, I've forgotten how... and I'm not sure whether whatever it was that I used to do ~7 years ago will still even work under Windows 7.

At this point, I'm not even sure whether I'm supposed to be able to load the .mp4 file in TMPGencPlus2.5 and have something like ffdshow kick in automatically in the background and "just work", or whether there's some other mechanism I have to use to get the video into TMPGenc.

[ulapines]

Download and try the trial version of TMPGenc 4.0 XPress instead.
Never mind, just saw that you can't afford it.

[Gavino]

At this point, I'm not even sure whether I'm supposed to be able to load the .mp4 file in TMPGencPlus2.5 and have something like ffdshow kick in automatically in the background and "just work", or whether there's some other mechanism I have to use to get the video into TMPGenc.

TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 has a built-in DirectShow File Reader which can load anything that a DirectShow player (eg WMP) can load. If you have ffdshow installed and configured correctly, and an mp4 file splitter, it should "just work".

However, my experience is with XP - it may be more complicated on Windows 7.