For MPEG-2, HCenc (
latest version, and the one I tested with) runs without problems in Wine*, gives excellent quality, is aimed at DVD compliancy, and it's free. I rarely use TMPGEnc these days because HCenc does pretty much everything I need it to do. My own profiles for HC024 can be downloaded here (copy the profiles to C:\Program Files\HC024 for ease of use):
http://www.mediafire.com/?nttyug25zny*even on Snow Leopard, which I can test under now.
On the other hand, it does divide the workflow - you need to encode audio and mux the file in separate steps, although it can be batch scripted, like so:
#!/bin/sh
wine wavi input.avs - | wine aften -b 192 - output.ac3
wine hcenc_024 -i input.avs -o output.m2v -ini "C:\Program Files\HC024\16-9_NTSCfilm-6000.ini"
wine mplex -f8 -V output.m2v output.ac3 -o final-output.mpg
For all I know there are OS X builds of aften and MJPEGTools mplex, though. You may even be able to grab them through MacPorts too.
HCenc's GUI interface does run just as well in Wine, so the only other steps would be making sure you have a frontend to aften (like
EncWavtoAC3, but I didn't test it) and a frontend to mplex (like this one:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jplex-gui/files/ - didn't test this one either; you may need to put mplex.exe in Wine's C:\Windows folder or in jplex's main directory, though...needs Java, so the Windows version of the Java JRE is probably required). To use HCgui with the profiles I provided, load the profile first,
then load the AviSynth script and define the output .m2v file.
Concerning Wine itself, though, thisismyinter no longer has downloads of it. I also would
not recommend WineBottler (although the panel menu is nice, wish they had that in the regular version) because of syntax differences and general wonkiness. I followed the tutorial on
http://davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/ to install it via MacPorts, and I've had no problems with it since - although the process took a while to complete on a 3 or 4 year old iMac. But it works exactly the same way it does on Linux. After installing it this way, I would first run
wine regedit so that it can generate the configuration directory, and then suggest adding the drive_c folder (/Users/Name/.wine/drive_c) to the Sidebar in Finder so you can quickly navigate to it. If you get errors concerning permissions when trying to use wine to open a program, then the following will fix it:
sudo chown -R Name:Name /Users/Name/.wine
(where all those 'Name's are the actual username, of course)
Secondary Wine note: To edit Wine's PATH environment variable, open regedit again, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>System>CurrentControlSet>Control>Session Manager>Environment, double-click on the PATH entry and add the directories to it, separating them with semi-colons. This way there's no worries about
wine hcenc_024 actually working if you put the HC024 folder in C:\Program Files instead of putting the .exe in C:\Windows. I do wish that Wine's configuration dialog had an option to do this without digging into the registry, but I think the diagram below is clear enough.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (a.k.a HKLM)
+-System
| +-CurrentControlSet
| | +-Control
| | | +-Session Manager
| | | | +-Environment
| | | | | +->PATH
| | | | | | [Path environment variable for searching programs.
| | | | | | Default: c:\windows\system32;c:\windows;C:\Program Files\HC024;C:\Program Files\mplayer]