I have been finding ways of viewing what I can loosely call "downloaded content" on my TV since around 2002. That year I bought an "Ellion" DVD player that could play Mpeg-4 (DivX and Xvid) from burned CD-Rs and DVD-Rs (and -RWs). Whoopee! That lasted about 5 years, started giving awful criss-cross patterning, I suspected failing capacitors somewhere. So I shopped around and got a Panasonic DVD player, same capability plus USB drive support. Now I could put AVIs on a pen drive. No more burning, except for stuff I wanted to keep. All this time I was using CRT TV sets with SCART. Both players had resolution limitations you might expect, so increasingly I was having to downscale some stuff using Virtualdub. Fast forward (!) to 2012. Got a Samsung 32" smart TV, and at the same time, a Seagate NAS with DLNA server. As my wife (who had misgivings) eventually said, "I'm glad you dragged us into the 21st century". Play MKV natively over ethernet. No more burning, no more pen drives. I still have half of a 50-stack of DVD-Rs and a bunch of 2,4,& 8 GB pen drives that I may donate to a museum some day. However that's no consolation to people with legacy hardware. There are honest, free, "ffmpeg GUI" type apps out there, including one called Avanti that I used to use. It's still available. The website says use version 0.9.2. You have to separately get a Windows build of ffmpeg and drop into a particular folder for Avanti to see. You can get and add AviSynth as well if you really want a complex experience. It has a (for me) attractively "busy" interface, but here is what I just did using all default settings::
Didn't trouble the CPU unduly (unlike Handbrake). The "message/warning" was just an ffmpeg remark about a deprecated way of passing codec parameters, didn't stop anything:
[avi @ 0000000002663940] Using AVStream.codec to pass codec parameters to muxers is
... deprecated, use AVStream.codecpar instead.
Input mkv (from Youtube using youtube-dl) is 42 MB, VLC says "H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)"
Output avi is 146 MB, VLC says "Mpeg-4 (DIVX)"
