Are there ANY low-cost DVD authoring apps that can take a 2-3 hour long VBR-encoded MPEG-2 file and permit interactive navigation within the video clip without trying to reparse the entire file from the very beginning every time to find an I-frame?

Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2 is by far the worst offender, but even DVD Workshop suffers from the same shortcoming. It makes trying to set the lead-out, chapter beginnings, and thumbnails just about impossible for any VBR-encoded video longer than an hour.

I really, really want to use VBR, because 2600 VBR @ 352x480 looks about as good as 3500 CBR (same res) when encoded in realtime using ATI MMC 7.7, but leaves enough room to fit 180-200 minutes of video on a DVD... exactly the length I need.

I tried using TMPGENCplus to cut up the big .mp2 files, but it crashes every time I try to do it. I'm not sure whether it's a bug in TMPGenc, an inability to deal with 3 gigabyte files, or a fried codec somewhere.