Fast MPEG-2 encoder

(I'm surprised this isn't in a sticky. A search for fast MPEG-2 encoder gave some good but ancient information!) I have TMPGEnc Plus 2.5. I like it, but it's slow. I'm looking for a fast (or very fast) MPEG-2 encoder, preferably free or cheap. I'm not looking for a hack for anything expensive. I'm looking to hit DVD compliant ~8Mbps with good (not perfect) quality. I need real time or faster on a P4 2GHz machine. Any suggestions? Cheers, David.

QuEnc. Search for it. It's the fastest MPEG-2 encoder I've ever used. :D

I second QuEnc as being fast. On my Athlon 64 laptop @ 1.5 GHz I get 25 to 30% faster than real time encodes.

Thank you for the advice - I've tried both and had good results with QuEnc, though unless I uncheck "high quality" it's still slower than real time. Cheers, David.