Handbrake

There are several presets for popular devices including iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Apple TV and a Universal option as well. You can tweak them for standard or high quality conversions along with more advanced options for encodes. File containers include MP4 and MKV. With a variety of video encoders, audio encoders and audio pass through. You can utilize a title or chapter range selection with batch scan and encode queueing. There is a constant quality or average bitrate video coding option. And a good selection of video filters as well. The video preview is a great feature included in this free software as well. I find the user interface to be relatively straight forward and intuitive to use. While it's not the most intuitive in the market it's by far the easiest and most powerful of the free options in my opinions. There is also a decent help guide if you need troubleshooting help. And although I've had not reason to look for them yet, open source solutions generally have a lot of friendly free support available if you look around for it online.

This is not a complaint personally as I've never had a use for decrypting video files in order to rip them, but unless I am mistaken there is no commercial decryption feature available in this software I believe, so if you're interested in doing so with copy protected commercial videos you'll have to find another way to take care of it. Though I wouldn't recommend it at all to begin with.

I was interested in this open source video transcoding solution for converting videos to update a couple of videos into current formats and downsizing other into .MP4's for my iPhone though there are other purposes for it. While there are several online converters which will convert video into other formats for free quite quickly nowadays all of them I've found have size limits around one hundred megabytes. So while this is a viable option for most smaller videos anything larger requires a more robust solution and this is it. Considering it's free and you can use it to convert any size of video file that's tremendous value and I highly recommend it.