Gretas problem with mencoder/mplayer under Panther 10.3.1

[Arnaut]

I have a 15" AlBook 1.25 GHz with 80 gigs and 756 megs RAM, I'm using ffmpegX version 0.0.9a on Panther 10.3.1; my problem is this one: I followed the instructions to install the engines and got a positive result.
But when I try to encode with mencoder my iMovie DV files (each 1.9 gigs) it doesn't work; when I open one of them, mplayer starts but then crashes before it can give me infos about the file (I have to make all infos on the file in the video tab myself, changing NTSC to PAL, etc), and when I try to encode with mencoder with Terminal option, I get this message:

Last login: Sun Dec 14 14:38:50 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
tcsh: /sw/bin/init.csh: No such file or directory.
pbpaste | sh
[Arnaut-Naegeles-Computer:~] arnautna% pbpaste | sh
Encoding started on Sun Dec 14 14:38:52 CET 2003
Using GNU internationalization
Original domain: messages
Original dirname: /sw/share/locale
Current domain: mplayer
Current dirname: /usr/local/share/locale


MEncoder dev-CVS-030226-15:00-3.1 (C) 2000-2003 Arpad Gereoffy (see DOCS)

AltiVec found
Reading /Users/arnautnaegele/.mplayer/codecs.conf: can't open '/Users/arnautnaegele/.mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory
Reading /usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf: can't open '/usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory
Using built-in default codecs.conf
File not found: 'frameno.avi'
Reading config file /Users/arnautnaegele/.mplayer/mencoder: No such file or directory
success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x79C49B80
Encrypted VOB file (not compiled with libcss support)! Read DOCS/cd-dvd.html.
MPEG-PES file format detected.
Encrypted VOB file (not compiled with libcss support)! Read DOCS/cd-dvd.html.

The last line repeats indefinitely

Please help me major, the workflow was functioning perfectly under Jaguar with the same software, but now it only works withffmpeg, and I need the mencoder filters really.

[major]

Try to use Quicktime player to export your files to .mov with Motion JPEG A codec, and encode that one.

[Arnaut]

I don't have QT pro, so I did the export in iMovie with MJPEGA highest quality and unkompressed audio; now I can encode it, but when I do so, I get great black blocks in the movie, either I play it with mplayer or VLC; I will tweak a bit the settings and see what it will bring.

By the way, can I use the pantheronlybinaries from sourceforge with ffmpegX or shall I stay with ffmpegXbinaries from sourceforge??

Thanks for the quick help, major!!!

[major]

can I use the pantheronlybinaries from sourceforge with ffmpegX or shall I stay with ffmpegXbinaries from sourceforge??

Use only the binaries mentioned in the ffmpegX installation instructions.