I realise that this is a little lazy but................

I watch a lot of video files on my TV through an svideo cable. I thought it would be a good idea to make a vcd of the movie we'd made for some friends but I can't find a simple way of doing this without learning to use a load of new command line tools that look very complex.

I've done a little looking around and I figured I could maybe use transcode to convert my avi files to mpeg and then burn a vcd with k3b. Is there a gui for transcode that allows a newbie to convert movie files without having to read an encyclopedia first?

Use ffmpeg. It has VCD, SVCD, and DVD settings so you do not have to worry about the settings in transcode. Below is an example from ffmpeg documentation.

ffmpeg -i myfile.avi -target vcd /tmp/vcd.mpg

It does not get any easier than that. If you want to capture straight from a video capture card (aka video grabber) and you think your computer is fast enough

ffmpeg -vd /dev/video0 -ad /dev/dsp -target vcd /tmp/vcd.mpg

I think the those command line programs are simple enough, but if you must. Try kino or avidemux. Though some GUI programs are too complex and sometimes a little hard to understand, so command line programs gets to the point very fast.

(plug)

You may also find my script tovid useful.

(/plug)

Avidemux is a nice gui for this because you can edit with it.
You will need to mux your audio and video together afterward
from a term.
I use "mplex" which is part of "mjpegtools".

mplex -f 1 -o vid.mpg vid.m1v vid.mp2

While I use Avidemux for cuts and so forth, Electro is right about
doing these things from a term. Once you learn how, it's faster and
easier.

I was really surprised how easy it is to capture TV with "mencoder"

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=1800:vcodec=mpeg4 -tv driver=v4l:norm=ntsc:channel=38:chanlist=us-cable:adevice=/dev/dsp:width=640:height=480 -o tv.avi tv://

Give "ffmpeg" a shot for your vcd's.

If your not comfortable with scripts, just write the command to a text
file and copy/paste it into a term whenever you want to run it.

I use a combination of ffmpeg to encode it to mpeg format then vcdimager to make a bin/cue file and finally cdrdao to burn the image.