It's a codec issue, yes. You probably don't need anywhere near 270 codecs on your system. What comes with Windows, the XVID codec, Flash 10, and an MPEG-2 decoder are all you really need. System-wide codecs are a product of a now-gone era. Software such as VLC and GOM have player-embedded codec systems, so you no longer need computer-wide codecs installed.
Codec packs are notorious for installing too much conflicting crap, and making a system misbehave with audio and video files, both for playback and editing/encoding.
Look at removing some of the codecs with the freeware tool DXMan. Get it from
http://www.analogx.com/contents/down...n/Freeware.htm
At this time, I don't feel comfortable saying Procoder is better than
TMPGEnc Plus. My last tests with Procoder 3 were about 10 months ago, and I was very aggravated at bugs it had with FLV, H.264 and other non-DVD encoding. I did briefly test MPEG-2, but I don't remember it being better than
MainConcept, nor was it terrible -- memory is a bit fuzzy on this. The goal of the test was for streaming work, and it failed miserably.
MainConcept Reference is vastly superior to
TMPGEnc Plus and Procoder 1-2 (and probably 3), yes. It's available for $460 from the official site:
http://esd.element5.com/affiliate.ht...mainconcept.de -- and I honestly would not buy it anywhere other than from that link (MainConcept themselves). Of course, that's not within everybody's budget. At the slowest encoding settings, TMPGEnc Plus can still do quite well.
That review of Procoder -- where was it? There are some reviews/pages on this site that need to still be updated.