Wintel Codec purgatory

[Mark Lachniet]

Or is it hell?

Hello all,

Many apologies if this is old-hat stuff. I looked in the archives for a
ways back, but am still hoping to get some better pointers. All the 
TiVO-Net stuff works as promised. Extracting streams isn't a problem, 
and getting m2v/m2a files on my system isn't that painful. Where things 
get wacky is in actually DOING something with the stream.

I see a lot of talk about codecs (m2v, elecard, etc.) and about various
programs. I'm very familiar with doing normal conversion (mainly ripped
DVD's) with the usual programs. However, my MPEG streams are never
recognized on my windows boxes. Does anyone have a tried and true
set-o-installs to perform to take the average windows box to the point
that TMPGenc can read and convert a file? I can watch them fine with
Windows DVD type programs, and DVD2AVI can load the first frame (though
it has crazy shimmering results on a convert - like it doesn't see key 
frames or something). What I really want is to load the buggers in 
TMPGEnc and Premier to mess with them, but I cannot for the life of me 
find a working codec.

Thanks!

Mark Lachniet
mark at lachniet.com