Maybe my relative ignorance of mpg encoding is showing itself again, but it would seem as though if you did a soft wipe on an mpg, output as uncompressed AVI, and then re-encoded with a high quality encoder at a constant bitrate that exceedes that of either of the two clips you're joining (which is my process), that you wouldn't be losing any quality whatsoever. At least, I can't detect any difference between the re-encodes and the official DVD. Am I correct on this? I'll have to post some files to show you what I'm talking about.
Maybe my relative ignorance of mpg encoding is showing itself again, but it would seem as though if you did a soft wipe on an mpg, output as uncompressed AVI, and then re-encoded with a high quality encoder at a constant bitrate that exceedes that of either of the two clips you're joining (which is my process), that you wouldn't be losing any quality whatsoever. At least, I can't detect any difference between the re-encodes and the official DVD. Am I correct on this? I'll have to post some files to show you what I'm talking about.