I love the BBC Comedy series The Office, and have both seasons on DVD. A couple of months ago, I downloaded (from file-sharing-space) parts one and two of The Office Christmas Special (as yet unavailable on these shores). Lately, I’ve been having a heck of a time converting the files (one’s an MPEG file, the other a DiVX AVI file, both are PAL format) to be able to watch them on my DVD player at home. I wanted to convert them to NTSC DV format (720×480, 29.97fps, and so on) and burn them to a DVD-R at work, but that doesn’t seem to be working in Final Cut Pro (FCP Express wouldn’t scale them up from their smaller resolutions). The files end up way too big and the audio gets all jacked-up. There are a lot of Unix shell utilities (with names like MMT, mpeg2enc, mp2enc, mplex, vcdxgen, vcdxbuild and so on) and a bunch of freeware apps to give them a pretty face, but the numerous options seem cryptic; some just fail to work. Ah well, plodding along…