Advice needed on migrating my DV workflow

[RemarkabLee]

Hi folks. Hopefully someone can offer some help on my current PC workflow to move to the Mac.

1, Editing and authoring MPEG2/AC3 muxed MPEG files from a home cinema recordable DVD machine.

• Extracting the MPEG2 stream = Mac The Ripper or similar - check!
• Editing the MPEG2/AC3 single file LOSSLESSLY =
  UPDATE: SimpleMovieX could be a winner here, will try this
  UPDATE 2: SimpleMovieX does not play AC3 muxed MPEG2 files due to the use of the Apple QT MPEG2 plugin, so this is not much good to me. Back to the drawing board...
  
• Authoring the DVD with nice menus LOSSLESSLY - unknown (iDVD can't be used unfortunaley)

2, Previewing MPEG2/AC3 muxed file in Leopard

• Apples QT MPEG2 plugin fails to play with sound if MPEG2 file is muxed with AC3. I can't even get it to play with sound when the AC3 file is demuxed with same filename... Grr!
• Perian also fails to play MPEG2/AC3 muxed file - although I've not tried this after uninstalling the Apple MPEG2 component (what a waste of money...)
• MPlayer OSX seems to work okay, but has no post processing (i.e. de-interlace)

3, Playing MPEG2/AC3 muxed files via VLC with correct aspect ratio

• It seems VLC looks for another type of flag within the MPEG2 file to determin the aspect ratio. How can I change this within the file, is there a utility to do this? Equivilent PC utilities report the MPEG2 file is set correctly. I don't want to have to override the aspect within VLC everytime I use it...

Can anyone suggest the tools or offer any advice?

Thanks!!