On Aug 6, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
I would second the use of mencoder. I've dont it with videos from my Canon A80. mencoder has too many options, but something along the lines of: mencoder mymovie.avi -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=mp3:vhq -o mymovie.mpg that is not going to work, but should get you started. Sometimes mencoder gives good error messages about what you need to do and the man page is pretty extensive.
The online documentation also has some great examples, as well as discussion about what you want to do to get the best quality in various situations.
dvbcut is also useful. It lets you edit MPEG files and cut out clips without re-encoding the whole file.