.mov (quicktime) to .avi FREEware converter

i was looking around for help trying to find out about converting some .mov (quicktime) video files to .avi format in order to eventually get them onto dvd. couldn't find anything on my searches here on the afterdawn forums, so i looked elsewhere. downloaded several freeware software converters, but one worked really well and was easy to use, while still having many very advanced options. that turned out to be MediaCoder. i hope anyone else searching for such a tool here on the forums will now come across this thread and see if this tool works for them as well as it has for me. here is the description from the download page (http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/):

MediaCoder is a free audio/video batch transcoder, putting together many excellent audio/video softwares from the open source community into one friendly GUI. On video side, MEncoder is used as back-end, which provides support for nearly all known video compression and container formats as well as rich and useful video filtering features (e.g. post-processing, 3D de-noise).

Latest version:
0.5.0 b2338 (Jul 27, 2006)

Feature Highlights:

Converts among many audio and video compression formats and re-mux into various container formats, on the fly, in batches
Give you the control over the transcoding process and all the parameters of your converted file, so you can learn about, compare among and play with various codecs
A flexible device plug-in infrastructure brings specific interfaces for specific devices
Fully standalone, no need to install any media player, filter or codec, no registration of any components into your system
Typical Applications:

Improving compression / reducing file size
Converting for audio/video portable devices (digital audio player, MP4 player, mobile phone, PDA, PSP, VCD/DVD player etc.)
Extracting audio tracks from video files
Ripping audio/video discs
Supported Audio/Video/Container Fomats:

MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+V2, MusePack, WMA, RealAudio
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, WMA Lossless, WAV
H.264, Xvid, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, H.263, Flash Video, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video*
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, RealMedia*, ASF/WMV*, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, VCD, DVD, CUE Sheet

* supported as input only