MPEG with LPCM audio to smaller but lossless format?

If you really need lossless, flac-in-mkv, mpeg-4 lossless, or Apple lossless in mpg/mp4 via dbpoweramp is the way to go. (Apple lossless is around the same size as FLAC but more compatible with mp4.) A high enough bitrate aac or mp3 could be perceptually lossless while saving even more space, but that's entirely up to you. [Shoot, I guess only itunes encodes Apple Lossless.] Here's a link to , btw, though I don't know of any dshow decoders yet. It's rather fast (around half the speed of flac) and somewhat smaller than flac most of the time. I'd wager it could use some optimization.

yep, if you're just archiving these videos, don't convert them at all. the LPCM isn't taking up as much space as it could. LPCM 48/16= 1536 kbps. mpeg-2 video needs a much higher rate than that without looking like poop, and i'm guessing your videos are closer to the 5000-7000 kbps range. just burning these source files to DVD should be sufficient for archiving (if they're bigger than 4.38 gigs, you might want to split them).

The average mpeg video bitrate 9900 kps. :)