In the previous post I went through how to rip a DVD and convert it to watch it on the iPod touch. This time I wanted to convert a simple AVI video to an MP4 file with H.264 encoding, while trying to keep the file as small as possible.
Most of free (and open-source) tools you can find online to convert videos from one format to the other are based on FFmpeg, an open-source command line program that can encode lots of video files to a huge set of other formats.
However, command-line tools are usually not known for their user-friendliness. Therefore I'd suggest you check out WinFF, a very simple GUI interface to FFmpeg that lets you pick some conversion options from a list of presets (or define your own presets) and batch encode a set of files using them.
