Just to see if I could do it, I yanked the hard drive out of my old Showstopper ReplayTV 3030 and used Extract_RTV to copy a show to my PC's hard drive. It's in MPEG-2, 720x480, 8000kbps, with audio mpeg 1 layer 2, 32kHZ sampling rate, 224 kbps.

After fixing the errors with Womble's GOP Fixer, I used TMPGEnc to split the m2v and the mp2.

I then used BeSweet to convert the 32kHz mp2 file into a 48kHz, 224 kbps ac3 file, then used TMPGEnc again to create an MPEG file with AC-3 sound.

I used DVD MovieFactory 2 to burn it to a DVD and put it into my player. Picture quality is fabulous. MUCH better than most clips from my newer ReplayTV 4160, in fact.

Audio for the most part is good, but there is a slight crackling sound which raises or lowers in volume along with the ups and downs of the soundtrack.

I'm suspecting the crackling was put there by BeSweet during the mp2 to ac3 conversion.

I'm going to make a DVD of the original MPEG with the mp2 sound and see if that crackling was there originally. Meantime, anyone with ideas how to get rid of it?

Thanks...