Converting MP2 to DivX

[Tim_Myth]

Let me first explain that I am a complete novice. I have vast hardware knowledge, but not a clue about applying the power at my finger tips.

Here's what I've got:
Athlon 800 (Hopefully a 1.4 soon), ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon, an SB Live Platinum, two 7200rpm 60gig HDs, and a Hollywood DVD Decoder card. I am running Win 2k for my OS. I have DirectTV piped directly into the PC, and I have managed to record movies to my hard drive. The output is formated in MP2 (which I assume is MPEG 2 since it won't play without the RealMagic card in). I get great quality, and except for minor sound muffling the recording is virtually indistinguishable from the original. These files have been upwards of 7 or 8 gigs.

What I want:
I want to compress these files to fit on a CD.

What I have tried:
FlaskMPEG, MPEG2AVI, and TMPGEnc don't seem to want to open the MP2 files I have created. This likely an ID10T error.

Does anyone have a nice little step by step instruction sheet detailing how to record movies with my system and compress them to fit on a CD?

[Batman]

Try Virtualdub for capturing. Capture in uncompressed avi then convert it to divx, again using Virtualdub. Read guides at divx-digest.com and vcdhelp.com on capturing and do a search on google.com You can create mpegs using TMPGENc.

[jjbreen]

The only solution I've found that always works

Use DVD2AVI to convert the MP2 to AVI. You'll be left with a file containing the video (an AVI) and a file containing the audio track (an MP2). Use Winamp to convert the MP2 to a WAV file by changing the output to Disk writer. Then open the AVI in Virtual Dub, set Video Processing to Direct Stream Copy, Audio to WAV Audio, select your WAV file, select Full Processing from the Audio menu, and the required compression from the Audio menu, et voila

[setarip]

If, in fact, these files are MPEG2 format, the software you've listed (Flask, etc.) is probably gagging on the filesize. Try splitting the files into less-than-2Gigs-each filesize first.