h264enc is an advanced and powerful interactive menu-driven shell script written for the GNU/Linux operating system which can help you to encode a DVD, a video file, a directory with video files or a (S)VCD to the H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC video format using the MEncoder encoder from the MPlayer project and the libx264 library. It supports muxing the final encode from AVI to Matroska, from AVI to OGM, from AVI to TS and from AVI to the MP4 container.

h264enc is written in a way to be useful for power users yet it is also very user friendly for people who are novices when it comes to video encoding. h264enc operates by asking questions to the user, collecting the input and passing it over to the encoder software. One of its unique features is the ability to use built-in video quality presets. This is especially useful to people who are just starting to encode video.

h264enc has a total of 61 video quality presets ranging from Ultra Low Quality to Near Lossless Quality - one can even write his own preset file and use it for the encoding. It further has the ability to auto-detect a lot of things like DVD/(S)VCD titles, chapters, subtitles, audio streams, and it supports frequently used video filters like scale, crop, dering, deblock, denoise, noise, deband, (un)sharp mask/gaussian blur, software equalizer, deinterlace, interlace, inverse telecine/pullup and hard telecine/3:2 pulldown.