Guys, don't be jumping to Canopus and spending hundreds of dollars to get good MPEG2. Try Cinema Craft Basic. I really cannot stress how awesome this piece of software is. I have done hundreds of DVD encodes with it and love it to bits. The quality is absolutely fantastic. Indistinguishable from the original DV footage at moderate bitrates, and that's with underwater footage too, which is extra-challenging. Procoder version 2 caught up with it in quality terms but is way more expensive. CCE Basic is only US$58. It's completely robust. I typically framerserve into it from Vegas (debugmode) and it as never crashed on me in years. But best of all, it's blisteringly fast. Way faster than any of the other MPEG2 encoders I've ever used, and has allowed me to hit countless tight deadlines. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still faster than TMPEGEnc Xpress plus SpursEngline.

I'm surprised I don't see more mention of CCE on the forums.

(.. and no I don't work for Cinema Craft).

And srode, if you don't need more than 2 subtitle tracks take a look at TMPGEnc Authoring Works for Blu-ray and DVD authoring. It's stable and pretty easy to use once you get used to the wizard-style walkthrough. I can get projects done pretty fast with it. And for Blu-ray it won't reencode HDV input, whereas DVD Architect will. Just done 15 Blu-ray projects with it and I really like it.

Edit: Would be nice if TMPGenc got the SpursEngine supported in Authoring Works as well as Xpress so that we could frameserve AVI into it and get faster MPEG2 encoding. That could make a really fast DVD workflow.