I'm most obliged to STeve and to Mick for guiding me on the issue of converting from a video DVD film to a file whch can be nicely watched using Windows -- to both for pointing out that I had been using the wrong audio encoding and to Mick for suggesting possibilities. In the end this led me to run
mencoder -oac help
which showed that the available audio codecs were
copy, pcm, mp3lame, lavc, twolame, faac
Some experimentation led, after a few failures, to the command
mencoder dvd://1 -o denvermilllookeast2010.01.05.avi \ -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=wmv2
which gave a result which plays satisfactorily using both Windows IE and totem on Linux (though I don't guarantee that it is optimal! It's just what happened to work). The result is at
http://www.zen89632.zen.co.uk/DenverMill/denvermilllookeast2010.01.05.avi
Thanks for the help! (But what a caper). Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 07-Jan-10 Time: 19:29:39 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------