ffmpeg is a collection of components that makes the backend for a lot of GUI media convertors. If you’re a fan of the command line, you can do quick and easy video conversion from just about any video format to just about any other video format. For example, you can convert a video to a format suitable for an iPod Touch or iPhone using this command:
ffmpeg -i source_video.avi -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 900kb -mbd 2 -flags \
+4mv+trell -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320x180 -title Title output_video.mp4
If you wanted to, it would be fairly easy to make this into an alias or a bash script so you don’t have to remember it all. Maybe I will at some point and update this post, for now I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.
Using this command, I transcoded a 42 minute XviD video in just 12 minutes on a 2.2Ghz Athlon (and just using one core, I’m not sure if ffmpeg supports multicore encoding). And the quality was more than good enough, though you can increase the quality by simply increasing the number after the -b (bitrate).