Welcome to the Ranch, John!
One of the most popular media-conversion and play applications available is the open-source mplayer/ffmpeg system. It is extremely powerful and can convert pretty much all of the popular formats and quite a few of the obscure ones. It's command-line based and the manual on it is pretty thick, but you'll find plenty of documentation on its use on the Internet. I've used it, plus a few other tools to take an over-the-air digital TV broadcast stream and make a playable DVD out of it, including a video table of contents.
A GUI open-source program that I have used in the past is "ProjectX". It's written in
Java and it's not as all-powerful as mplayer, but what it does it does well and it completely puts the lie to the old claim that Java is "slow".
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.