DVD-R "sample pack" arrived today. I discovered that the mpg output of the PVR-250 hardware encoder isn't quite right for encoding to DVD however. Luckily it's not a problem with the encoding itself, so pulling apart the video and audio streams and remultiplexing them is enough to fix it. I now have a script using tcextract, mplex, dvdauthor, and mkisofs to take any input mpeg file and build an iso file which I can then burn to DVD. I also discovered there's some incompatibilites with my DVD burner under linux, so the burner itself is now in my dad's machine. Our network can easily handle streaming the DVD iso though, so it's not really a big deal. And I'm sure he'll appreciate the fast CD-R burner that he can use for a while too. So far I burned a recording of Back to the Future III to DVD-RW and threw it in my parent's DVD player and it was awesome. It's only a 32" TV but the quality still looked pretty good. My player doesn't like DVD-RWs, so it's now burning to DVD-R and we'll see how it goes. Maybe if these keep going well I'll bump up the average bitrate again too, to eliminate a bit more of the MPEG compression artifacting. Now to just find a quick and easy way to edit out the commercials and pick good chapter break spots...