VLC while mainly known for being a good video player, can also be used as a tool for transcoding. Since it has good support for most formats, it is a good choice when wanting a powerful and yet relatively simple transcoder.
It is possible to both do transcoding from commandline and from the graphical user interface. However the graphical user interface lacks many options (ie. cropping), and the commanline options are not build in a standardized way. This guide will give some very useful commands for transcoding with VLC through commandline.
VLC comes with 2 executables, vlc and cvlc. both accept the same options, but when using cvlc the GUI will not be launched. This is very useful when transcoding on a remote machine without access to a desktop.
