[MEncoder-users] help encoding jpeg frames to video with soundtrack

[Ken and Timi Cecka]

Hi All,

I'm new to video encoding, so I may be making some simple blunders, but I
can't for the life of me get this animation to work right.  I've got
approximately 4000 frames of time-lapse photography stored as 480x640
jpegs.  I'm trying to encode them at 15 fps in a format that will play
easily on windows, and add a soundtrack.  Emphasis is on quality over size.

No matter what I do, I seem to either get lots of blocks showing up in the
cloudy background, orange streaks across the middle of the image, or both. 
I've tried a variety of commands, but here's one for reference:

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=15 -o test800.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts
vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800

I'm omitting the audio for now until I get the video playing correctly, but
the audio track is a wav file (soundtrack.wav) of approximately equivalent
length to the animation (assuming 15fps).

I think a big part of my problem is that there is so much changing from
frame to frame; the images were shot on a 6 minute interval, so the
cloudscape and light level has changed significantly from one frame to the
next.  But I would think there should be some way to encode this, even if
it means storing each frame in full (I've tried motion-jpeg, but it doesn't
play in windows).

Thanks in advance for any help,
Ken