FWIW, my impression has always been that MPEG-2 was a fine codec if you gave it enough bitrate. Where it falls down is that its bit-starved behavior is much uglier than H.264. For that reason, H.264's advantage is not really on disc, where space is plentiful, but in things like streaming, where the bitrate is throttled way back by necessity. I'm sure there's also some minor advantages on disc that derive from this, such as better VBR performance due to better low-bitrate performance, and maybe some other minor things too. But if you give MPEG-2 30Mbps to work with, my impression was that it could produce fine-looking results.