There are very good reasons for this. The most important is a poorly designed user interface. To be fair this has improved over time, but in my opinion there isn't another consumer MPEG encoder with a less user friendly interface. That's really a shame considering how good the results available from it are. No software excels at everything, but for a general purpose MPEG-2 encoder under $100 you certainly can't do any better than CCE Basic.
Instead of simply walking you through the steps to complete a specific task, this guide will simply cover settings that you'll need to understand when you start encoding. You should, however, have a reasonable understanding of MPEG encoding and how CCE's settings can be used to get the best results possible by setting them correctly.
If you find that there are a lot of terms or concepts in this guide that you don't understand, I highly recommend reading through our basic guides, including our recently added Digital Video Fundamentals guides. You can also find a lot of good information in our Glossary.
Required Software
CCE Basic
