Managing 1080i video clips??

I've downloaded many 1080i videos in .TS format and I use VLC media player to watch them. The de-interlacing algorithms in VLC work OK, but not great. I was wondering what most people do with .TS files. Do you watch them as it is, or do you first convert them to 1080p or 720p, before watching. I tried converting 1080i to 1080p using AutoGK. It works, but it takes a long time to convert and the file size doesn't reduce. For 1080i->720p, file size does reduce dramatically. I do like to store these video clips for future use, so what's the best format to store them??

Store them in their original format.......
You might want to give zoom player pro a try. You can customize it to use certain codecs with transport stream files and it works GREAT!
I myself use.....
Elecard mpeg2 demux
Intervideo audio decoder
Intervideo Video Decoder (Hdfastmode 0)
It de-interlace the video perfectly and plays perfectly fine on my pc.

Also, depending on cpu speed it can take take Hours or even days to convert a 1080i movie. If you really want to convert your 1080i movies you should have a look at this website, it has a nice xvid guide (http://www.samek.neostrada.pl/hdtv/hdtv2xvid.htm)

what do u mean by future use?
to view them for pleasure or for video work or stuff like that. what kind of system do you have?
personally, if you can easily expand your hard drive, leave it the way the video is...
if not, i would use winrar or winzip to compress the video files.
the good thing is that you dont loose quality. the bad thing is that it takes a long time to get a good compression.
the other way is to reduce it to 720p, but i would try to avoid that method because after compressing it, you can expand it back to 1080i without keeping the original quality.
its up to you, but personally,i would go with no compression or the winzip/winrar method.

You cant save any space trying to compress video, you might save a few mb's but not much worth doing.

What about just burning the ".TS" files to DVD±R/RW?
As for the intelacing, VLC never worked for me... :confused:
I don't know why, but it just skips frames, and the audio comes out all messed up on one of my PCs for me (it just sucks...) :(
So I use Elecard's MPEG2 Player (link (http://www.elecard.com/products/mpeg2player.shtml)), it's $20 and the best player out there, and you don't need WinDVD's or PowerDVD's or any other software. :)

Thanks for the info guys.
Actually, I had tried Zoom Player with elecard before, but I couldn't make it to de-interlace. May be I need to dig a deeper there. Thanks again.

I play all HD content on Windows Media Player 10; its just a matter of having the right codecs installed....

-Elecard MPEG2 Demultiplexer
-Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder (ATI)
-AC3 Filter

CPU usage never peaks 25%, even for 1080p content. For some reason, 1080p clips become slideshows with PowerDVD 6....

Thanks for the info guys.
Actually, I had tried Zoom Player with elecard before, but I couldn't make it to de-interlace. May be I need to dig a deeper there. Thanks again.

Sometimes when hardware acceleration is enabled it doesnt de-interlace properly. Intervideo is a GREAT codec if hdfastmode is disabled through the registry but can raise cpu usage as much as 2x! It de-interlaces video REALLLLY good though, worth it.

Heres a tip, dont watch them on a Pc, buy an HDTV and a IOData Linkplayer2 and watch them all on that, life will never be the same when you can watch downloaded 1080i shows on your HDTV..

I use HDEDITOR to view all my TS format clips and movies
nice small program weights only 4MB