Update on an alternative to tcrequant (deprecated)

Hi:  I used to use tcrequant within MythArchive to shrink mpeg2 
recordings (from DVB-T) to fit onto dvds.  Just over a year ago I found 
video corruption in recordings processed on an x86_64 box under Fedora 
10, but not on an i686 box under CentOS_5.  At about this time tcrequant 
was deprecated and no longer built by default in the transcode package.
Later there was discussion on this list about using 'vamps' to do the 
same job.  I persisted with this but often had failures associated with 
end-of-file effects in dvdauthor.

Recently I came across what seems to be a good replacement for the 
tcrequant functionality, although it isn't a direct replacement because 
it needs the size of the input file as a parameter.  The code is very 
closely based on the newer Metakine release that was also used in vamps, 
and there is a makefile that makes installation painless.  I have seen 
no artefacts when using recompression factors of up to 3 on an x86_64 
box, and the process is very fast.

The download is here:

  http://code.flexion.org/M2VRequantiser.html

and there are threads at

  http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/367308#367308

and on the atrpms and myth-users lists.

HTH

John Pilkington