.MP4 to MPEG-2 conversion... How to best achieve?

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

I'm in the midst of a journey to convert/transform what was a HD 720p video on U-Tube to a fully complaint MPEG-2 file which will eventually be burned to dvd.

So far it's been morphed into a .mp4 file which was the best format option I had and that's where things currently stand.

I want to maintain the highest quality and change the "container" to MPEG-2 without subjecting the file to any further encoding/recoding if at all possible.

From there I will put it onto a Adobe Premiere timeline with other video clips for further work.

Am I better off by first going from MP4 (which is a unfamiliar format to me) back to avi or stick with the original mission?
Any and all help suggesting workflows, tools or processes would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much.

[mh2360]

I want to maintain the highest quality and change the "container" to MPEG-2 without subjecting the file to any further encoding/recoding if at all possible.

Not a chance!

The present format of your file is nowhere near DVD complaint, you will have to recode it. It's not just a case of changing the container, the video and audio will have to be encoded to DVD specifications, which I very much doubt they will be now if the video has been grabbed from Youtube.

The DVD video specs can be found here.

https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

[guns1inger]

If it is a 720p MP4 file, keep it that way while working in Premiere, do whatever editing is required, then output a DVD compliant mpeg-2 file from the Premiere timeline.

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

Well, what I was trying to avoid was to compress an already compressed file and degrade quality. MP4 is compressed and if I include that file on a timeline with regular .avi clips which are uncompressed, when it comes time to render to MPEG-2, the MP4 file will be compressed further.

[guns1inger]

Your source was youtube, so it has already been compressed.

It is 720p, which is too high a resolution for DVD, so it will have to be resized down to DVD spec.

MP4 is not DVD compliant, so it has to be re-encoded to mpeg-2 for authoring.

Get the idea ?

Now - if you are converting the file to mp4 yourself after downloading from youtube then you could try encoding to a lossless codec like lagarith or huffyuv instead. You will still have to resize and re-encode to mpeg-2 at some point, but you remove one unnecessary re-encode from the process.

[zoobie]

a stand alone player that supports MP4?