[MPlayer-users] Using mencoder to create Windows- and MacOS-friendly movies

[January Weiner 3]

Hello,
	recently, I have tried to share some of my .avi movies from my
digicam, which were created in Linux with gphoto2.  It turned out that they
are neither playable in Windows (Windows Media Player), nor in MacOS
(Quicktime Player).  The movie appears to be played, but all you can see is
a blank square.
	It crossed my mind that this would be a perfect way of forcing
millions of users into using mplayer, thus ensuring World Domination and
the monopoly of mplayer; however, it turned out that I have slightly
overestimated my audience.  Both people who would like to watch my avis are
not capable of going beyond a standard Windows or MacOS installation. :-)
	Therefore I wondered whether it is possible to encode them with
mencoder or mplayer into a more easy-to-use form.  One way I have tried was
to turn them into an mpeg using mplayer -vo yuv4mpeg and mpeg2enc, which
basically worked except that my orignal avi had ~10 fps and mpeg2enc does
not allow arbitrary fps values, so my film got a little faster.

	Here are my questions:

	First, I don't know much about how all those formats work, (say,
	what are the differences between the codecs and encodings, which of
	them are standard, and which are recommended), and would be happy
	to get some literature references on the subject.

	Second, maybe you have some experience with that and could
	recommend tools or ways to achieve my task?

	Best regards,
	j.

----)-\//-///-----------------------------------January-Weiner-3-------
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.