Slow, interactive, but it works -- looking for scripts

I've got a lot of videos of my son. When imported from the camera they're AVI files (yes, I know that's just a container, but I don't know enough about video formats to know what the actual encoding is).

The videos are pretty large. I've found a good way to make the files smaller though. Using kino, I import them (I get a larger .dv file). And then convert it to MPEG4 AVI. That works pretty well. Large files (150MB or more) convert (at High Quality, full size, progressive, 2240 kb/s) to about 1/6th the original AVI size. Small files (30MB or so) only convert to half the original size. But that's pretty good, nevertheless. The proximate reason for looking for ways to encode the files to be smaller is because I post some of them to youtube and those original AVI files greater than 100MB get rejected.

Kino has a .FLV converter too. That's interesting. But I don't think I want to keep archives of .FLV files. I'm a bit conservative about file formats and I tend to go with standards (de-factor, or de-jure) when given the choice between file formats which are on different points on the standard-non-standard continuum.

I've looked around for scripts to do this conversion. Haven't looked hard enough though, apparently. I could read the manpages and learn enough about video and audio encodings and transcoding so that I could hack up my own scripts. Too lazy to do that though. I'll wait until something comes along that's better than what I've got.

This is what it feels like to be a mere user :-). Normally I'd just totally geek and learn what I needed to get something working. Taking care of my son, and taking videos, and juggling disk space so that the videos will fit and can be backed up though, that takes all my time :-).

I've looked (via ps auxw) at the command line commands that kino spews to do the conversion. I may test some of that out. I don't know if everything I need is in there though. If it is, and a test works tomorrow, I'll hack something up and possibly post it here. But possibly not, too. Nonworking holiday tomorrow, I'll be playing with my son :-).