My main question is at bottom, if I can create a file for Windows Media Player that will stream. I am also open to suggestions about my command line, and better compression. Thank you in advance, here goes... Someone sent me section of a DVD and I was able to copy the files to my hard disk and access like mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device /var/www/html/dvd My goal was to make the output Web file a lower resolution, compress as much as possible, and put on Internet. After much reading of newsgoups, I came up with mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device /var/www/html/dvd -afm ffmpeg -vfm ffmpeg -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=48 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vqscale=10 -vf scale=270:135 -o movie_abr48_q10_270_120.avi which makes a video that works very well. However it seems I am still getting about 20% worse compression than I see on the news.yahoo.com videos. My biggest problem, however, is the video does play with Windows Media Player, but it does not stream. It is 10 MB so takes minutes to load/start, and you only see a blank screen. I have tried giving my file a .mpeg or .avi extension. If I run mencoder with -of mpeg I get many lines like Unknown block type, possibly non-MPEG stream! 6mb A-V:0.057 [0:0] and a bad output file. Someone wrote me this about streaming video files (last two paragraphs). I have not seen much supporting documentation for this. Is this true? thank you very much in advance, tom http://www.readyink.com yes, this is where you either 1) Pay Microsoft for Windows hosting including streaming or 2) Convert the file from it's current .avi format [which puts the ident at the end of the file] to a .mpeg [which puts the ident at the beginning allowing the file to stream]. Personally, I would go with #2 and use .mpeg (quicktime) formats. These are more standard than microsoft's avi which contain to many codec's to be viable. Someone wrote me.