Wikipedia
__NOTOC__ MediaCoder is a proprietary transcoding program for Microsoft Windows. It has been developed by Stanley Huang since 2005.
MediaCoder uses various open source (and several proprietary) audio and video codecs to transcode media files to different audio/video formats. Common uses for the program include compression, file type conversion, remuxing and extraction of audio from video files. Many formats are supported, including MP3, Vorbis, Opus, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Windows Media Audio (WMA), RealAudio, WAV, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, Audio Video Interleave (AVI), Video CD and DVD-Video.
While MediaCoder is supplied free of charge and fully functional as long as there is an internet connection available, it is supported by bundling the OpenCandy software recommendation service in its installer. During a batch conversions once a certain number of conversions have been performed a window appears requiring human interaction (a simple CAPTCHA) to dismiss or pay a donation in order to remove the periodic nagging. ($15 minimum in 2011, $20 in 2012, $25 as of August 2013) This qualifies this application as nagware. After donating the user is supplied with an ID which must be entered and verified in the software. If the software is subsequently used without being connected to the internet the nags will reappear because the software randomly checks online whether the user has a valid ID unless a USB license dongle is purchased.
Prior to 2008, MediaCoder was a free and open-source software application and was available on SourceForge. MediaCoder was a nominee of SourceForge.NET 2007 Community Choice Award of Best Project for Multimedia along with Audacity, InkScape and FFDShow. On December 2009 however, Stanley Huang announced that the project is no longer hosted on SourceForge and no longer open-source. A list of older versions, release dates and release notes can be found here.