Making clips Windows Media Player likes

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <200706051638.l55Gc9Wu014651 at smtpclu-3.eunet.yu>
            Nikola Lecic <nlecic at EUnet.yu> writes:
: Hello
: 
: On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 09:59:03 -0600 (MDT)
: "M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
: 
: > In message: <20070605162424.0510a425 at localhost>
: >             Norberto Meijome <freebsd at meijome.net> writes:
: > : On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:15:10 -0600 (MDT)
: > : "M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
: > : 
: > : > Is there a secret to making video clips that windows media player
: > : > likes?  So far, all the ones I've done result in a fatal error at
: > the : > end.  Is there a code/format I should specify to make things
: > good? : > 
: > : > The source material is DV video that I've encoded with Kino and
: > then : > split apart to get a few short (~10s) clips that are the
: > highlights. : 
: > : what encoding? wmv? 
: > 
: > The clips are currently encoded for a DVD in mpeg2video format.
: 
: I think mencoder (a part of multimedia/mplayer) can do what you want.
: It handles mpeg2video.
: 
:   "mencoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder) is a simple movie encoder,
:    designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies (see above) to other
:    MPlayer-playable formats  (see  below). It encodes to MPEG-4
:    (DivX/XviD), one of the libavcodec codecs and PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio in
:    1, 2 or 3  passes. Furthermore it has stream copying abilities, a
:    powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate,
:    scale, noise, RGB/YUV conversion) and more."
: 
: (mplayer manpage).

Thanks for the suggestion.  I've been using mplayer/mencoder for about
three years now to view videos and to do some minor transcoding of
videos.

Hoever, I've spent the last three weeks with kino, mencoder, ffmpeg,
mpg2desc, mpegtranscode, and mpginfo trying to come up with something
that will work.  These tools all work great together to translate the
DV videos into generic MPEG streams that dvdauthor/dvdstyler can use
to make nice DVDs.

The specific question I have is what hoops do I need to jump through
to make it work with Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker.
What container formats work best when you are sending clips to
relatives that have just Microsoft's media player?  Which codecs are
the ones that I want to use?  Does that answer change if I use Windows
Movie Maker?

So far my attempts to discover the right things by trial and error
have been frustrating and have all ended in error.

So my question isn't 'what tools' to use.  My question is 'what
parameters to feed to the tools to be maximally compatible?'

Warner