I have an ancient handycam from Sony and a box full of tapes. What I want to do is convert them to digital in a format that can be later be reencoded again if needed and burnt onto DVD. These tapes are irreplaceable and as such I wanted a lossless codec for both audio and video. I have a BT878 capture card and using streamer I have dumped the data onto disk, at something like a 1 GB per 15mins its not very efficent. Due to the PAL format between the computer and the camera, they are interlaced as well.

What I want to do is convert the avi file into something more managable without lossing much data and also to deinterlace them. The -vf pullup,pp=md option dosn't provide great video so I'll need something better (but probably slower - this dosn't matter). I'm not sure what format streamer is outputing but here is the result of midentify:

ID_VIDEO_ID=0
ID_AUDIO_ID=1
ID_FILENAME=*
ID_DEMUXER=avi
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=MJPG
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=25115672
ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=720
ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=576
ID_VIDEO_FPS=25.000
ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=0.0000
ID_AUDIO_CODEC=pcm
ID_AUDIO_FORMAT=1
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=2944000
ID_AUDIO_RATE=92000
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_LENGTH=1029.60
ID_VIDEO_CODEC=ffmjpeg

I realize the codec for DVD is mpeg2 but I have heard its not very efficent and so I was looking for something better and smaller.

Don't make me use Virtualdub on windoze!!

I'm not sure you need streamer... mencoder should be enough. I highly recommend that you read this excellent resource:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/
You'll know everything you need to know about the DVD format, about how to obtain the maximum quality without "wasting bits", and so on.

Keep us informed. For your information, I'm currently in the process of transfering all my old VHS tapes to CD/DVD. I first record (real-time) in "almost lossless" format on disk (about 5GB for 2 hours) using mencoder, then I use mencoder again to do a two-pass encoding, which takes between 10 and 36 hours for a two-hour movie on my 1GHz VIA CPU.
I first try SVCD (viewable on any DVD reader); if quality is not enough, I try mpeg4 for a 700MB record; if quality is still not enough, I revert to mpeg2 for a DVD.

Yves.