Transcoding/downsampling video (mpeg2) file?

[glassvial]

I apologize if this is the incorrect forum for this question

I have a large mpeg2 file I wish to downsample the bitrate on in order to cut it so it will fit on 2 cd's. I ran a bitrate calculator so I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do, the question is how to do it. I downloaded REMpeg thinking that would help, unfortunately on all my machines as soon as I open any file, it crashes.

HELP! And thank you

[DJRumpy]

You can do it with reMPEG, although I never could get the bitrate just right in the software. It's not very intuative. If you have a preference for an encoder, just open it in DVD2AVI, and either save it as a new AVI, or frameserve it to the encoder of your choice (suggested).

You can find information in the Newbie, and Guides section. Look specifically for the DVD TO guides, and frameserving guides.

[glassvial]

No I can't use reMPEG, it crashes, remember?

I think I'll try frameserving it and see if that does the trick. Thanks for the suggestions ... I'm sure I'll have more questions soon (like why bbmpeg closes itself when I try to open a file...hmm)

[adam]

I think remepg is pretty outdated. If you want a quick and easy method, which yields acceptable to mediocre results, than transcoding is ok but use some of the newer commercial programs like DVD2ONE or DVD95copy or the very good and free DVD Shrink. For slightly better results use InstantCopy which encodes rather than transcodes.

For best results you are going to have to manually re-encode.

I'm guessing you are running WinXP. BBmpeg requires a patch to run on xp, just do a google search for "bbmpeg xp patch" and you will have no problems finding it.

[glassvial]

Yeah that's what I did, a re-encode. Ended up chopping off 500 meg from the file, which was more than enough (I was only like 200 meg over, doh!)

And actually I have a 2000 machine and an XP machine and they both had the problem. Found the patch, which fixed it...thanks for the heads-up.

I thought DVD Shrink (and the like) were just for vob files...do they work on mpeg files as well?

Ok time to fire up bbmpeg and split this new, 500mb smaller mpeg

Thanks again