That does look interesting. I'd completely forgotten about memcoder!

[edit] I just tried it on an .avi ripped from a dvd and it works just fine: file length is reduced, too! Now all I need is someone to lend me all their Buffy DVDs and ........ Many thanks![/edit]

In the meantime, the aswer to the previous question:

I think you're seeing "something" like

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

and here the "$" just indicates that you're in the shell. You can literally copy and paste the rest.