I am not a Transcode fanatic. I'll use whatever tool I have to get the job done. And I often check out the competition, hoping that something better will come along for dealing with this or that task (avidemux is a huge win for fixing sync issues, for example).
But, amazingly, Transcode always seems to win for anything but the most trivial encode. You can encode avi's to NTSC-DVD a good deal faster with just ffmpeg, and the quality will be excellent... As long as you don't need to adjust the color balance, gamma, or contrast... Or change the framerate... And aren't encoding animated material... And aren't hard-coding subtitles. All things I typically need to do. Thanks Transcode!
