Convert MPEG2 to MPEG4

[jeromeerome]

I have a huge collection of short (5min or less) videos in MPEG2 format. About 90GB to be exact. Storing these has become difficult. I am running out of room. Most of these are DVD resolution 720x480. Others are oddball resolution or SVCD/VCD resolutions.

Anyhow I would like to know my best options for shrinking these files down to save space with little loss in quality. MPEG4, Divx, Xvid seem to be the most popular formats. What method can I use to convert my MPEG2 to one of these formats. I have seen many post converting in the other direction but that doesnt help me much. Thanks...

[live4ever]

ffmpegX is a good choice for this.

[galactica]

options
open in quicktime pro and export over to mpeg4
use ffempgx
author as dvd with sizzle in order you want to appear in the mpeg4, use handbrake to select your authored video_ts folder and convert over to mpeg4 of your desired size/bitrate etc

[mhar4]

By far the best option I know of is to use the 3ivx MPEG-4 codec (www.3ivx.com) and their program DIVA, which gives a lot of control over the encoding process, including cropping, deinterlacing and automated 2-pass encoding. You could keep the original resolution and encode down to less than 200Kbytes/s using 2-pass encoding with very little loss in quality. It takes a bit of tweaking to get the best results, but its very impressive and the file will play under a vanilla install of Quicktime 6.

DIVA doesn't do audio, though, so you would need to demux and convert to AAC or your prefered audio codec.

[thoughton]

Although I would probably agree with mhar in general regarding diva (except having to separately process audio is going to suck if you have a lot of clips), I would also suggest ffmpegX, merely because it has a nice queueing system so you dont have to start clicking buttons again after each 5 min clip has encoded.