M2ts files play havoc with my media player and anything remotely resembling a search or rewind with these files totally confuses it. So I thought 'a conversion to avi and why not upscale to my tv's resolution while i'm at it!' Actually i've nearly finished the encode one more pass tonight (5 passes in total, 23 hours encoding time) and i've compared on my computer with the original and I can barely see any difference. Thanks for advice on the sound track.
ps ROTJ next ;)