Since its inception in 1998, the MPEG4 format has become a very popular one for encoding video, and its certainly a lot more robust than many of its predecessors. Unfortunately, this file type isn't to everyone's liking - largely because it isn't supported by some of the more popular portable video devices. MpegALot will help owners of gadgets like the iPod or PSP play MPEG4 files on their machine without a lot of fuss.
There are a lot of MPEG4 converters around, but few of them allow you to transform several video files simultaneously. Mpeg4ALot does, and it does it pretty well. The interface is very simplistic, yet there are still plenty of options for customising the size and quality of the exported files. For instance, you can tweak the resolution, the bit ratio of the video or audio, the number of pixels, and the number of sound channels. While there are certain formats that it won't convert to (MOV, for example), this program is ideal for converting multiple MPEG4 videos quickly for use on a portable player.
Pros
Lots of options for customising output file
Autorun mode
Cons
Won't convert to a complete range of formats
Interface looks a bit old-hat
MpegALot has one purpose - to facilitate the encoding of large amounts of videos to the MPEG4+AAC format (for ipod, PSP, etc). It has several useful features that greatly simplify this task. Here are some of the most important:
Clean, unified, streamlined GUI that handles all the various "behind-the-scenes" open-source command-line encoding apps
Encoding frontend is completely multithreaded to take advantage of multicore/multiprocessor/hyperthreaded systems to greatly speed up batch encodes
Accepts both files and folders as sources, and can apply custom filtering rules to specify only certain files/folders to encode
Can recurse through source folders to encode all files in all subdirectories
Output all encoded files to a single folder or to a directory relative to each source's path
Can preserve metadata from source to output files
Multi-user aware, so multiple users can run different encoding jobs without interfering with each other
AV presets and encoding jobs can be imported/exported as simple XML files for easy transfer between machines
"Autorun" mode suitable for launching from the command-line or task scheduler
Extensive logging mechanism and GUI for debugging errors and monitoring progress
Able to encode almost any file that is playable in Windows Media Player
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