It is freeware. The time limit is only on MPEG-2 encoding. This was they
only way they could do it. TMPGenc 12 and 12a had MPEG-2, then the
MPEG group started to enforce the liscense to use MPEG-2 encoding, so
later betas of the program took MPEG-2 out, even later betas put it
in as an eval feature, to allow people to use MPEG-2 again without
loosing out on being a free program.
There is a shareware/commercial version planned, but no official announcements
have been made yet. You can check threads at
vcdhelp.com
for more information on TMPGEnc betas and a possible workaround for the
time limit.