[Vorbis] XiphQT / Theora Questions

[Michael A. Peters]

Hello, I hope this is not an inappropriate list for this.
This is the list suggested by http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

I use Linux exclusively at the moment and do not plan on buying a Mac, 
but I am working on a CMS including html5 media support.

Patent licensing costs forbid decoding proprietary video formats on the 
server for transcode into Ogg Theora so I am looking for a way that non 
technically inclined (IE afraid of the CLI) users can produce Ogg Theora 
files on their own to upload (along with h.264).

I'm hoping that with XiphQT installed, for Mac users anyway it is as 
simple selecting Ogg Theora on some kind of export menu from QuickTime 
Pro or iMovie. Is that the case?

Secondly, is the software stable enough for use by the general population?

If XiphQT is not a suitable solution, is there another that is user 
friendly?

My understanding is that many of the solutions out there are CLI only 
(IE ffmpeg2theora which I use on Linux) and often require using ffmpeg 
first to get the video into a format that ffmpeg2theora can work with.

I know on Linux I frequently end up splitting the audio and video before 
running ffmpeg2theora because some source files have interlacing issues 
that ffmpeg2theora does wrong (part of video interlaced, part not) so I 
have to first fix that in ffmpeg, then encode it with ffmpeg2theora (and 
transcode audio seperately), then use oggz-merge to put them back 
together - and that is not the kind of thing I want to walk clueless 
users through.

If I had a Mac (or a PC running Windows) maybe I could play with it and 
answer these myself, but I simply do not at this point in time.

Thank you,

Michael A. Peters