Quae nocent docent

Courtesy of one of my Museum Angels. Hmm, they need LJ Pseudonyms (TM). I'll call her Natalie.

Does anyone out there have any experience with mencode or some sort of similar video transcoder? See, I have these RealVideo files that I want to convert to some other format, because (a) Real sucks, and (b) I don't think an hour of video should take 500MB. I don't much care what format the files end up (although all else equal I'd probably prefer Ogg Theora purely for ideological reasons).

Anyway, my sketchy research uninformed by any semblance of expertise and unsullied by any possibly relevant knowledge or experience leads me to the highly tentative supposition that mencode is what I want, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to use the goofy thing. Apparently I've been using GUIs as crutches for so long that my ability to do things with command lines has atrophied to a withered stump.