Current 2007 Best Video Converter?
 

I'm completely new to the world of encoding essentially, and I'd love a program that could convert pretty much anything to/from anything.

Ability to convert swf to a workable video format would be a plus.

So, any idea as to what the current leader in conversion software is?
(I'll just torrent it, so feel free to recommend expensive ones).

Probably the best movie encoding possible can be done free with MeGUI from http://www.doom9.org , but in terms of anyfiletype to anyfiletype? I would say I havent heard of a do-all program, but AnyDVD by Slysoft is awesome.

http://www.doom9.org/software.htm

Gordian Knot for ease, MeGUI for efficiency. And FYI, the new cool thing is to encode video with H264.

If you happen to be using a Mac, the best I've been using is ffmpegX. It's also free which is nice.

It's not free or open source, but I've found that WinAVI Video Convertor can do everything I need it to do. From the website:

Theres a free trial available, not sure what the limits are. You probably will want to just torrent it right from the start. If you can't find a torrent, let me know and I can send it to you.

As a last resort I found playing the movie while recording that part of the screen works too. I used Camtasia for that and it's great for making short work of recording movies with interactivity in them a converter wouldn't know how to convert; as long as your computer is fast enough not to lag. As I say it's really a last resort when all else fails method so I'd try the above first