How to encode a big uncompressed avi movie.

I had some big uncompressed avi files from my digital camera that I just wanted to compress in a highly portable format. The following is probably not optimal but results in a small avi file that plays basically everywhere (Linux and Windows without needing codecs).



$ mencoder input.avi -o output.avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vcodec=wmv1

This uses mplayer/mencoder to encode into the audio format MP3 and video format WMV1 (also known as, misleadingly enough, Windows Media Video 7).

Helpful links regarding encoding: