I have a video that is in MPEG format, but I am used to AVI quality, or at least something better than what I have now. I want to have the best quality I can get for the video before I convert to DVD and burn. How should I handle this? (I tried search function for a MPEG to ??? conversion program, didn't work).
You cannot improve quality, you can only hope to maintain what's there. Garbage in, garbage out. I would just author the mpg as is. Encoding to anything else will only drop quality.
