[ale] Need help from video junkies...transcode and iMovie '09

[Jeff Hubbs]

I have a Hauppauge PVR-150 card that is capable of hardware-encoding 
MPEG-2 from analog input and it also produces YUV video and PCM audio on 
two separate devices under Linux. Creating an MPEG-2 file with video and 
audio from analog source is as simple as "cat /dev/video0 > myrip.mpg".

I would like to edit my videotape rips in iMovie '09 but because my only 
Mac is a MacBook Pro, I don't want to take up large amounts of disk or 
CPU doing transcoding on it. The open-source "transcode" utility can 
turn the card's MPEG-2 output into all kinds of things but I've yet to 
hit on an invocation of transcode that can produce something that I can 
import into iMovie '09 (I did get a result with .mov output but the 
chroma info was mangled in the process).

Here is a listing of transcode's output modules: 
http://www.transcoding.org/transcode?Export_Modules

My most recent attempts involved the ffmpeg output module trying to 
obtain MPEG-4, but the resulting file, while fully playable in VLC, 
won't open in Quicktime and won't import into iMovie '09.

Supposedly iMovie '09 imports:
DV
AIC
Motion-JPEG
Photo-JPEG
MPEG-4 (Supported profiles)
H.264 (Supported profiles)
Apple Animation (Movie '09 only)
Apple Video (iMovie '09 only)


My questions:
1) For quality's sake, should I be starting with the Hauppauge card's 
MPEG-2 output or find some way to use the YUV/PCM outputs?

2) Anyone know of an output module invocation for transcode that will 
produce something iMovie '09 will accept?