Command line VOB to AVI/MP4 with good quality and deinterlace

I have some VOB files, grabbed from DVDs. I need to make AVI/MP4 files for uploading online. The original resolution is 720p and I want 720p, but need to scale as the pixels are not square (720x480 to I want to do it with the command line; whether it's mencoder or ffmpeg (or even vlc if I can master its command line) is immaterial. But despite all googling I'm getting dodgy quality, notably, bad deinterlacing. Moreover some mencoder options I find are no longer valid anyway. (I want MPEG4/lavc encoding; let's not bother with x264). I would appreciate examples that give good quality deinterlaced MP4/AVI from VOB files. Which tool is used is immaterial as long as it's commonly available under Linux. EDIT: here is the output of ffmpeg -analyzeduration 100M -probesize 100M -i file.VOB . The subtitle track, however, is not needed.

`
Input #0, mpeg, from 'deathscene_from14_40.VOB':
  Duration: 00:35:51.24, start: 1068.184978, bitrate: 7986 kb/s
    Stream #0:0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p(tv, smpte170m, top first), 720x480 [SAR 8:9 DAR 4:3], 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
    Stream #0:1[0xa0]: Audio: pcm_dvd, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 1536 kb/s
    Stream #0:2[0x1bf]: Data: dvd_nav_packet
    Stream #0:3[0x20]: Subtitle: dvd_subtitle

`