Photoshop CS4 extended requires an MPEG-2 encoder in order to open MPEG-2 videos. I have heard horror stories about codec-packs and am wondering if there is a safe way to to get Photoshop to import MPEG-2 videos. I'm editing these MPEG videos in Premiere and don't want to mess anything up. I would rather not have to transcode to another format if possible. Thanks!

I would've assumed it would need an MPEG2 Decoder to simply open up the file...

Not familiar with this option, but if you have DVD playback software installed on your computer, the decoder should be there already..

I don't use Photoshop, but ffdshow should do the trick. It's open source software that works well. You can download it here: ffdshow | Get ffdshow at SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/)

BTW, I consider widely distributed open source software like that to be safer than payware (so long as you download if from a reputable site like sourceforge.net). If there's any malware in widely distributed open source software, with a bazillion programmers out there looking at the source, it'll get spotted and blacklisted in pretty short order.

I'd add to that link the "ffdshow-tryouts" link:
ffdshow | Get ffdshow at SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tryout/)
From the project's official website : "The ffdshow tryouts project is a fork of the original ffdshow project... The last modification to the source code of the original project was done back in May 2006. The ffdshow tryouts project has continued where the original project stopped..."

cheers