Free video/audio conversion (transcoding)

If you support web technology you are inevitably going to be asked to support video or at least offer some sort of video solution.  For many of us this can be a pocket where providing a good solution can be a challenge.   Understanding myriad formats for video and audio.  Providing support for delivering video to customers who may have slow connections or may have outdated devices can be a huge challenge.  If it’s the public web space then maybe the answer can be easy, you point them to YouTube, but there are limitations and one of the biggest is delivering video content that isn’t for the public.  Regardless, one of the tools you should have in your arsenal (especially for those who have a high volume of video coming in from various sources) is FFMPEG, this open source video/audio transcoder is flexible, highly customizable , powerful, fast, and offers loads of options.  It also is a command-line/shell solution so it offers plenty of options for automating conversion in batch file, shell scripts, or your favorite programming language.  You can also find loads of examples and gobs of documentation on the internet for ffmpeg which extends well beyond ffmpeg.org.  FFMPEG is to video/audio as Apache is to web servers.