[MEncoder-users] Intermediate codec from mpegts on the way to h264

[David Liontooth]

I'm capturing an ATSC QAM stream; if I write the cat'ed stream straight 
to file, it's about 6GB an hour.

I'm looking into my options for cutting this down a bit, using mencoder. 
I also need the closed captioning, however, so I came up with this:

mkfifo p1
cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 | tee p1 | mencoder - -cache 2048 -ovc copy 
-oac copy -o out.avi & zvbi-atsc-cc --atsc -T -m -C out.txt CBS-HD < p1

I don't have enough CPU power to take it straight to h264/aac/mp4, which 
is what I want to end up with.

Is there a good intermediate codec/format I can use that is not horribly 
CPU-intensive, and won't lose me too much quality -- something that's a 
good stopover on the way to h264?

Cheers,
Dave