I don't know how to do that in TMPEGenc, but I'll give it a try for comparison. I tried using TMPEGenc previously to transcode a video without success, but it just occurred to me that maybe my problem was that I didn't demux to separate video and ac3 audio, and that may be why Premiere couldn't open the resulting file. You may have solved this other problem for me. I'll let you know. Thank you.

Thank you Graham! I've been researching this DVD to AVI conversion process for HOURS and finally came across your suggestion to use VirtualDubMod. It works perfectly for what I'm trying to do. thanks.