Well if you are still into playing around with video encoders jason, how about trying and comparing these free ones.
One that I just tried out today called StarxRip (
http://www.planetdvb.net/staxrip/) I got because I was looking for a h264 encoder. I had capped some HQ game footage using fraps and it was looking nasty in xvid so I wanted to try out h264 encoding. The GUI is uncluttered, although there are many pro settings available hidden deep. What impressed me is while the initial program lacks some things like besweet, avisynth, codecs and such, the program tells you exactly what its lacking when it requires it for a job, and you just have to click one button to download what it needs. It uncompressed it and installs it automatically. The program also pops up large windows of text when you enter a new gui window explaining what the options that you are about to see will do. So new people to encoding are not left in the dark.
Best of all, its the first and only encoder I have seen that pegged every core in my quad core to %100.
I did pass over handbrake, it seems like a popular app for ripping dvd's to h264 files with plenty of presets for portables. However it dosn't support .avi at all so no single file encodes.
The last one was one I stumbled over for a more specific job. I was going in for jury duty so I needed to quickly convert a whole bunch of my anime to watch on my zen vision:m for hours on end. Unfortunately alot of my anime today is 720p h264/AC3/ACC encoded in a MKV wrapper with soft subtitles. You would be amazed at how many commercial and popular packages designed for converting videos to ipods/portables don't support these kind of files.
And I wasn't the only one. AllToAvi (
http://alltoavi.sourceforge.net/) was created with the intention of converting Anime that made use of soft sub formats to hardsubs for portable or dvd device use. I quickly threw a bunch of episodes from several series into it and told it to go and it did so at a very good speed. It did choke on one of the h264 series...a frame every couple of seconds would be corrupted and the audio quickly went out of synch. No idea what was causing it, must have been something with the original encode. One of the nice things I liked was it was easy to scale up the subtitles, so if you really have problems reading subs scaled down to the small screens, you can scale the subs up to larger then normal sizes.