Help finding an encoder?

[ellis90009]

i am new to linux and i thought it looked good so i thought i would give it a try the one i liked most was knoppix but it didnt install right when i tried the harddrive install but my second choise of suseoss turned out to be exceptionaly easy untill i wanted to start making use of my dvd burner i have a series of avi files i need converted into mpeg2 but i cant find a converter for it and the harder i look and still nothing is makeing me think i should stick with windows but i decided to give you guys a try can anyone tell me where i could get a converter i dont care if its kommand line based or gui as long as it works thanks in advance

linux user?
Steve Ellis

[spencerf]

mplayer comes with an encoder called mencoder.

you can find out more by:

man mencoder
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/mencoder.html

also ffmpeg
http://smorgasbord.net/convert_video_linux

take a look at this too
http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_MEncoder_Tips_and_Tricks

[ellis90009]

i installed and every thing i working alright but i was wondering is there any way to control the quality of the out put because it seems to dumb down the picture quality a bit should i ger a different encoder? or possably a codec? thanks for you help