I've been looking to upgrade my compression tools. I've been using TMPGEnc exclusively for the past 5 years or so for both MPEG1 and MPEG2. I've been wondering if there are any more professional encoding tools out there with more control capabilites than TMPGEnc?

What do you guys use and recommend?

for mpeg2, i use procoder in mastering mode, because the quality is so good.

it also does a really good job of encoding windows media format files... i use the satish frameserver hack to encode directly off of the vegas timeline into procoder.