More categories + MPEG encoding

Now that I can easily categorize posts (using labels), I feel better about posting about non-development topics here. I'll still try to keep it primarily work-related, but in addition to covering coding and tech support stuff, I'll also cover design and multimedia and anything else I'm working on at the time.

My current little pet project is to find a conversion app (not necessarily web-based) to convert a series of AVIs (or SWFs, which were the original format) into MPG files having MPEG-2 encoding.

There seems to be no shortage of little shareware apps for Windows that do file conversions like this, most of them in the $20-40 range, in fact I bought one the last time I needed to do this... unfortunately I misplaced the file and purchasing info from that. :/ But what I'd really be interested in is an open source app that can do batch conversions and/or be run from a command line.
One that I've been playing around with is MediaCoder, which seems to be an open-source Swiss army knife of multimedia file conversion. I'm optimistic that it'll be able to do the job eventually... I just need to figure out the right settings needed to make the files. So far, I can get it make an mpg file, but can't get anything but MPlayer to play the file. No good.

But there's a ton of settings and options to fiddlle with (the UI is a little klunky for presenting all the options), so hopefully I'll be able to figure it out soon, or find another app that can do it. Multimedia conversion isn't exactly at the top of my list of favorite things to do on a Sunday afternoon.