I was stuck with a quite a lot of avi, mpg, asf, mov files imported from cameras across the family with their own encoding styles. How do I make them easily available over the web without posting them to youtube was the question. I have flvplayer, integrated in zenphoto (I love zenphoto), which can play .flv files comfortably.
Fortunately, the open source tool ffmpeg came handy. The tool itself is rock stable and there are dozens of projects using this tool internally. It was a bit of a task understanding which of the thousands of switches to use in order to get that perfect conversion, but Taka flv encoder helped me out in that. Its so useful when a software provides us the internal command that it will use to complete the task which you have configured through GUI. Awesome.
Taka flv encoder itself wasn’t good for converting more than one file at a time. So instead of searching for batch file conversion GUI software, I just passed the bulk of files to ffmpeg. It had taken care of all videos in a couple of hours. Capable of converting most video formats heard by humans. So much for issues in free software!