In theory -- and unless they're broken -- they should each perform at least the basic encoding in ways that produce the same result.

In practice -- those with generally favorable reviews are probably interchangeable, except for peripheral "features" (which is where your question about "preference" becomes relevant, but probably answerable only by you.

And in both theory and practice, there's very little reason to make your final assumption -- namely that "one that works best with perl (sic)" -- because your Perl code is the glue -- but only the glue -- between the raw data and the encoder/converter. You may use your code to transform the data is some small way to make that data more acceptable as input to the converter, but it's not going to be doing some magical intervention on the operations programed into the converter.

Note that nothing above rules out the possibility that you could read-and-grok the specs for whatever source and output formats you're interested in... and then write your own converter/encoder in Perl... but that sounds like a much more difficult project than writing a script to feed data into a program or module -- one that does install :( -- to let the module or external executable perform the necessary operations.

It doesn't matter to Perl, Java, Python, or any other language

they all work exactly the same?

No, but they all have a CLI interface

theres gotta be one that works best with perl

No, computers don't work like that.