I've just been told by one of the guys that maintains the ffmpegx shareware video tools software, that is a fairly trivial matter to change the MPEG2enc utility (an MPEG2 encoder) to encode HD. It is apparantly just a matter of changing four variables and re-compiling it. I'm planning on trying this, and if it works I'll make it available free to people who want to use it. The source code for this is available free on the internet for anyone who wants to mess with it. It's been a few years since I programmed, so it may take me a bit to get up and running on a Mac compiler. so if there is anyone out there who is already up an running on Mac or UNix programming and wants to try it, I'll give them the details.
The interesting thing is that this person told me that most of the commercial MPEG2 encoders out there are based on this same code, and that the commercial encoders are not necessarily better in terms of quality.
On the PC, he says that the encoder called TMPgenc ($60 shareware) will encode HD out of the box. Has anyone tried this?

Paul,

I have a G5 1.6 ghz, if you'd like me to test anything.

heath

Thanks Heath, it actually seems even simpler than I thought, in that this program reads a parameter file, so I probably won't even have to re-compile it. I'll let you know if it works.

Paul, you got me really interrested here, I look forward to your experimentation.

Good luck.