[MPlayer-users] portable video format?

[Steve Kleene]

I've been trying with mencoder 1.0-rc1-4.1.2 to make a widely compatible
video for my web site and have struck out.

My goal was to post a video that would come up for almost any XP or Linux
user.  I've done a lot of reading and testing, but apparently not enough.  I
made 7 test videos as follows:

  test0.avi:  MPEG-4 codec, AVI container
  test1.mpg:  MPEG-1 codec, MPG container
  test2.flv:  FLV codec, FLV container (Flash video)
  test3.asf:  WMV1 codec, ASF container (Windows Media Video, v1)
  test4.asf:  WMV2 codec, ASF container (Windows Media Video, v2)
  test5.rm:   RV20 codec, RM container (RealVideo 2.0)
  test6.avi:  copy, AVI container

All were encoded with -nosound.  They all play fine with mplayer on the
Debian etch box I used to make them.  I tested them all on each of 3 XP
machines, with Media Player and RealPlayer.  I also tried loading them into
PowerPoint or Movie Maker.  The results were all over the map, depending on
what codecs the particular machine had, how their priorities were defined,
etc.  On one XP machine, neither player worked, but it played from within
PowerPoint.

Is their some bulletproof way to encode a video so that it will play on most
XP machines?  I gather that YouTube videos, movie previews, and the like work
for most people, but I don't know how to achieve that from mencoder.

I can post the test videos, but that probably wouldn't help.

Thanks.