Best Converter for MKV to AVI or MP4 with quantizer under Windows 7

[SeijoKoibito]

I'm asking for those with a lot of experience in transcoding MKV to AVI or MP4, to suggest what they believe is the best conversion software on a Windows 7 platform.

I have been trying for a while to locate a working converter that efficiently and consistently can convert .mkv files with subtitles into a SD or HD .avi or .mp4 file (real MPEG-4 NOT MS-MPEG4), and have been failing. I am reluctant to just add every transcoder that is listed here, as many don't work very well, and a few have left a mess of my system, even after uninstalling it.

I have been reviewing articles on this site for the last 2 hours, but cannot find a proper topic, as most refer to methods to convert to DVD or for PS3s, etc. Unfortunately, there seems to be an overabundance of articles that come up in the searches, and none of them actually seem to deal with this, exactly. It may be in there, but buried in hundreds of others that are not applicable. So, I am sorry if this actually duplicates a prior topic.

Of the 5 or 6 programs I've tried so far that promise to convert these, none have worked for one way or another (missing proper audio, can't output Xvid, AVC, or AAC, has no quantizing, can't resize or trim the image, doesn't see the subtitles, etc.)

Briefly , here is what I need——
Input: any .mkv
Prefered output:
Video: Xvid or AVC
Audio: MP3 or AAC
Subtitles: any format
Subtitles need to be "burned" to the video, and styled if presented that way
Must be able to both trim and resize video
Should have normalization or at least a dB output control
Must be compliant... H264, NOT x264 -- Real MPEG-4 NOT MS-MPEG4
Needs to work under Windows 7 64-bit
Most audio may need to be mixed down to stereo, but compliant multichannel passthrough is acceptable (AC3, etc).

Hopefully someone is experienced with a product that can do this, and it can be freeware, shareware, or if it's really worth it, a commercial product.

And I thank you in advance for the help.

[Baldrick]

x264 is compliant h264/avc and you wont find many avc converter that does not use it. Some h264 that are not x264 are Mainconcept reference and cuda encoders like badaboom but they have not that many other features.

What tools have you tried so far? I use a mix of several xvid and x264 converters to do all my conversions, like handbrake, xvid4psp, megui, avidemux.

[SeijoKoibito]

I tried five so far, but they were all horrid disappointments that couldn't even come close to doing what I have on a Mac (none of which work on MKVs or with any WMV component). The thing is, they were all so bad, I uninstalled them immediately (and promptly deleted the downloaded installers), especially the one that took more than 5 hours to do a 22minute video (on a 2.53Ghz Core2Duo), and crashed out the computer before it even got more than halfway done.
Since I easily found, on-line, more than 50 programs that claim to do the conversion (most of which don't even mention things like having a choice to burn subtitles, and select which ones), I was hoping to avoid just loading dozens of bad, unstable (and possibly malware infected) programs, and praying they could do the job.

I'll give HandBrake a shot... the older Mac version definitely didn't work, and when they went Mandatory 10.5, it still didn't work, and I can't switch to 10.5.
I use avidemux on the Mac, and it works excellently as an avi trimmer, but I never got it to work on any conversion reliably, most, actually causing several errors and not being able to complete an encode. If it's stable under Windows 7, I'll give it a shot.

Any other suggestions?

I've used ffmpegX and a few other mac and linux tools for nearly a decade, so I am familiar with many of the open-source tools used, and actually prefer ffmpegX's setup, as all it's codecs are isolated from the system, and therefore avoid conflicts. The main problem with using things like mkvtoolnix, is that many of the mkvs I get are improperly put together to begin with, and though they work with a couple of codec packs, once demuxed, nothing works right (i.e., the audio and video are wildly different in length, x264 was used, and short of putting it back in an mkv, is no longer recognized accurately, etc.)

I'm just surprised there isn't one package that obviously stands above all others to convert away from matroska.