best program for batch DV-AVI to h.264?

[oneoffrandy]

I've finally finished importing my family's home movies from a combination of Video8, Hi8, and Digital8 tapes to DV-AVI and did some simple editing with virtualdub. Now I'd like to do a batch conversion to h.264 so my parents can easily watch them on their computer without taking up a ridiculous amount of space.

So what program would be best for a newbie like me and, more importantly, what settings should I choose in said program to preserve video quality while not taking up a huge amount of space? (I do understand that with compression there will always be some quality loss)

Also, considering the videos are interlaced, is there anything special I need to do? I'd like to have the option of burning to DVD and streaming through an Xbox 360 in the future if that affects anything, though my first priority is high-quality computer playback while maintaing an acceptable size.

Thanks!

[themaster1]

For max quality you should use mbaff to keep it interlaced
If you have many videos to deal with and two computers you can use a soft like ripbot which split the task between the two (might be a lil difficult to set up for a newbie) so you can encode faster
more infos:
http://www.thehtpc.net/htpc-tips-and-tweaks/ripbot264-distributed-encoding/

ripbot official topic:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127611