converting avi files to mpeg?

[turbine]

Got this pc camera (logitech) and so far i can only run same on winxp. I want to view the videos on knoppix but the logitech software only produces avi files. They don't play very well with xine even with the latest codecs. So I see this program ffmpeg which is supposed to convert video files from one format to another. I'll be danged if I can get it to work. It always crashes with some vague error message. Does anyone know of any reliable linux/knoppix program that I can use to do the file conversions? There seems to be tons of them available for win$ but I don't want to use those.

[angor]

I had success with
<code>
mencoder -oac pcm -ovc lavc "Unicycle Jousting.avi" -o UniJ.mpg
</code>

The "pcm" and "lavc" were pure guesswork on my part
"mencoder -oac help" shows a available audiocodecs, -ovc does the same for videocodecs.

[turbine]

Thank you, angor. I'm using the knoppix 4.02 DVD and it has ffmpeg but it doesn't seem to have mencoder. Any thoughts?

I've got a limited understanding of all of this but it seems to me that these conversion apps are dependent on having the right codec installed. In my situation I guess if I had the right codec, if one existed, then I could play the file successfully and wouldn't need to convert it.