Wow, I used to use this many years ago when ripping DVDs was a thing and also for the occasional transcode to mkv. I had no idea it was still in development. I'll have to check it out again.
Why transcode just to package media into an mkv container? Mkv is pretty much codec agnostic, you could probably just steam copy. You'll save a lot of time and audio-visual quality by doing so.
I transcode because H.264 saves me a lot of space over MPEG 2. I don't notice the quality loss but I do notice the disk space and faster file transfers.
This is true indeed, mkv is a great container. The reason for my question was that the OP appeared to be transcoding (a codec-level operation) just to switch the container type. When it was mentioned that the transcode was to convert from MPEG-2 to H.264, my question was answered. :)