Downconverting H.264 with TMPGEnc Xpress help?

[Brains]

I purchased TMPGEnc Xpress a bit over a year ago after a recommendation, and so far I've been very happy with the output.

Recently someone gave me a bunch of H.264 encoded MKVs, and as there's nothing in the house that can play them, I've tried to downconvert them into a normal DivX AVI or a normal DVD with TMPX without much luck -- everything turns into a blocky, artifact-laden mess.

My goal is to turn the 1280-by-something 8GB monsters into a 720-by-whatever AVI of less than 2GB, ideally no larger than 700 MB. Are there any particular TMPGEnc format settings I should be using

[guns1inger]

If you want to go down to 700MB then you are going to take a big quality hit. You should reduce the resolution to 640 or less wide, and do a two pass encode. I suspect that these videos also have DTS or AC3 audio at high bitrates. You will have to encode the audio to 128 kbps mp3 stereo mp3 to help preserve the video bitrate. Personally, I would not go below 1400MB unless the running time is less than 60 minutes.

[Brains]

Quality isn't that important - it's not like I'll be bothering with a wide screen telly in the future - but duly noted for the tips.

In my experiments, I had already set audio to mp3 128k 2ch, but hadn't messed with any of the video settings because I wasn't sure what they actually did. I'll see if more experimentation with a 2-pass encode can improve matters.