I have a little movie (a wmv file), which I can watch with mplayer without problems, but my friends can't - so I would love to convert it to a format, that works on every machine without having to download a new movie player. I have tried mencoder with
mencoder blabla.wmv -oac pcm -ovc xvid, but the resulting image quality was very bad. As it seems, I can't encode to mpeg (which would work most likely). The formats supported are: copy, frameno, rawrgb divx4, lavc, vfw, qtvideo, libdv, xvid
May be I can install another codec somehow but I haven't found any info on this. What would you do?
Thanks

To encode into MPEG, you need to first extract the video and the sound in seperate files.

Hmmm... and how am I supposed to do that? I tried to nosound option for mencoder, but I still cannot encode to mpeg.... I'm using gentoo - the mpeg codecs are installed.
I've tried googeling and searching, but no success

well mencoder should be abel to encode to mpleg, but i don;'t think the sound encoding works yet, you'd use the "-of mpeg" option to specify the actual output wrapper (an avi by default). encoding to divx is probably a nicer bet though, e.g.

mencoder blah.wmv -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=300 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=64 -o blah.avi

for a medium to low quality divx5 file