StaxRip

One of the finest MPEG-4 encoder GUI's available. Beautiful interface. Tons of options and customizations, allowing for an almost limitless amount of tweaks. Freeware perfection. (Also: Not officially abandoned.)

Very nice GUI that basically uses already free encoding programs like BeSweet, eac3to, x264, DGIndex, MKVtoolnix, AviSynth, VirtualDubMod, etc under one single and easy to use interface. You just select the files, choose your options and your are done. I have never seen a more simple to use program. Also supports job queuing so you can do multiple encodes.

One wish though would be to port it to Linux. I know it is written in .Net but Linux really needs something this easy and powerful.

Just the most polished, the most feature rich, and the most bugfree converter GUI around.

5 stars !

AviDemux, VirtualDub, MediaCoder, they all always have problems converting mpeg-2 to XviD. Asynchron or corrupt audio, interlace, aborted renderings, ... . Except of FormatFactory, which converted DVB-Rips to XviD without problems, but only with a low bitrate (it always ignores the configured one), StaxRip was the first tool (or tool collection), doing it's job simply perfect. Very high quality, file size and bitrate I wanted, cropping and cutting abilities. I only have the 100% CPU usage to criticize. I recommend the tool to all people recording DVB movies.