HandBrake

zamboknee, reports on the net indicate that the content on your external HD connected to your Dish PVR is encrypted. You won't have any luck trying to do anything at all with it. This is apparently how Dish was able to provide the USB drive without running afoul of HDCP and copyright requirements.

Interestingly enough, the PS3 does support playing MP3 Surround through the TOSLINK. I don't know what software or what workflow would mux this into a video file that the PS3 could use, though.

It's entirely possible to encode for PSP in a way that also looks awesome on a laptop or TV. It encodes as AVC (i.e H.264). Set your resolution to exactly 720x480. When viewing on the PSP you can use the PSP's viewing controls to adjust it on screen (so it doesn't get stretched or squashed). Works r...

TedJ, I would guess that media players do in fact deinterlace any interlaced material, simply so they can display well on the PC. A top quality algorithm would be CPU intensive and would likely drop the frame rate below acceptable levels, so they probably use a not-so-great method. This is speculati...

The content I've been starting from is MPG2 from DVDs. When viewing the untouched MPG2 from Media Player Classic it looks normal (as expected). After encoding to AVC with handbrake's PSP, playback on the PC in full screen mode immediately shows the same behavior as interlaced video (like in the guid...

You have no idea what deinterlace does, do you? I know exactly what deinterlacing does. If your display is 480 lines, interlaced video creates two fields of 240 lines each (one field lights up the odd lines, the other field lights up the even lines). Deinterlacing creates progressive video, buildin...

I spent a few days reading this forum and experimenting with various settings with the goal of encoding from a DVD to an output that looks great on both the laptop and the PSP. Then I can free up a lot of disk space and take my pick which medium to watch the same file on. I finally found a good comb...

You wrote that you are using the preset. You must not be using it "as is" because the built-in preset creates files with the extension .mp4, not .m4v. If you change the codec to H.264 and then render, it will create an AVC file with the .m4v extension. It won't play; it will instead get th...