Of course MediaCoder is just a fancy shell over FFMPEG and a lot of over video/audio tools. It is however extremely convenient since the installer brings all these tools as Cygwin executables, whereas it's a pain to compile them oneself (I never myself managed to compile FFMPEG with x264 support under Cygwin, it's just too much pain and it's quite an unnecessary distraction when all I cared was to get some video files right away. YMMV.)

There are two problems with MediaCoder though. The first one is that it's again yet-another Cygwin-based app which installs some Cygwin DLLs (just like the NX Client for example.) So if you happen to already have Cygwin installed both MediaCoder and your Cygwin install will be broken if don't tweak it around (I haven't tried but I think doing the same trick as NX should work, that is locate the new DLLs and trash them before they run and register themselves.) The second issue, which is minor, is that it's a bit of a nagware; each time you run MediaCoder is actually opens a web browser to display its homepage and ask for a donation. I have no problem with freeware asking for donations but I find nagging to be a bit objectionable -- it screams "I make it free but really I want to get paid for it". Makes one wonder about what happened to shareware.

Besides that it's a great tool and I highly recommend it.