Also, manpages are awful if all you want to do is encode easily (they also aren’t such a nice read) and their only other documentation – the examples pages – is chuck full with broken links.
There are not many important things on the manpage. Usually you would set video quality (-v) and maybe audio (-a) and that's it. Theora does not offer a gazillion switches, it is an easy codec.
Saying that ffmpeg2theora is easy ignores the huge portion of the population who create their movie in Adobe Premiere or iMovie or whatever and click export and choose "TV" or "Youtube" or whatever format with automatic defaults and it looks good and it works. Until you get a GUI on Windows that's even better than Super (which I really like but is really scary to people who don't do much video encoding) it won't get anywhere. Handbrake is the only program I recommend to non-coders. (And my brother uses it fine.)
Have you tried the Miro Video Converter? It's supposed to be easy and does H.264 for iPod, Nexus 1 etc. as well as Theora at web rates:
I didn't say I was happy with recommending handbrake, it was simply the least complicated option I had seen and my brother seemed to be able to muddle through so it was just good enough.
Miro looks a lot better though, thanks!
https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki...
I'd be interested in their reasoning for this, though I remember for a while the best quality possible on iPods regardless of time to encode was high bitrate MPEG4. I wonder how big a difference there is at these screen sizes?
After I finally got something valid, I ended up settling with a file 1.6x the size of the h264 file I would've created that looked only a little worse.
For amateurs like me ogg is hard. h264 is easy.