I've had a lot of sucess in setting up a very nice TV Tuner on my computer, but not so much in getting the MPEG1 Videos produced from it to play nicely in becoming DVDs.

Normally, I like playing around with all the crazy video stuff, ripping DVDs, getting their audio out with BeSweet, amplifying it in Audacity, while screwing around with the video in DVD2AVI, and putting things on my ipod, but I've given up on making good DVDs out of these files.

The first annoying thing is that these files are huge. A 20 minute recording at the highest quality from the tuner ends up being around 800 megabytes. Now, I could convert them to a DivX video file, but then if I wanted to later burn them to a DVD, i would lose a lot of quality, having already gone from MPEG1 to DivX and then to MPEG2, or so I have read anyway.

So I'm tired, tired enough to be willing to pay for programs that will make things easier, but offer me more control in what I want to be able to do. Basically If anyone is up for it, some suggestions of programs that would be able to take my gigantic MPEG1 files and make them smaller MPEG2 files without losing too much quality and being DVD ready, and a program that would allow me to make relatively nice DVD menus, would be great.