imovie .mov file to mpeg4 (mencoder)?

[behoovedgirl]

i've got several videos that i'm trying to get from imovie to the mpeg4 (avi, mencoder) preset in ffmpegx 0.0.9L.

i've never had a problem just using the .mov file that's created by imovie as the source video in the past (when encoding mpeg1, svcd's and such), however with the mpeg4 avi encoder, it's not letting me. it doesn't even seem to recognise it as a valid video file.

the only workaround i can find is to re-save the quicktime movie as a self-contained file. the divx encoding works fine this way, but it takes forever to export beforehand (each movie is an hour long), and i also don't really have the extra hard drive space for it.

the audio is also not getting encoded. i know i can just re-mux it in afterwards, but is there any way to get it to work, and avoid that extra step?

thanks in advance for any advice!

[behoovedgirl]

i don't know if maybe i didn't explain myself clear enough.

does nobody know how to encode an avi from the imovie .mov file? or if this is something that can be made possible in future releases?

it's taking me like 6 hours to take each hour long video from imovie > avi, because of all the extra steps i need to do.. and it's driving me insane!

[major]

Check if "fast DivX" behaves the same or not. If yes there is no solution for now, but I'll add another to-do list entry.

[behoovedgirl]

fast divx doesn't seem to work either. however, it seems to be for a different reason... it says it's an unsupported codec, rather than not recognizing the .mov file as a valid video file. i don't know if it's just my configuration or not though. here's the output just in case it helps any:

Encoding started on Thu Jul 22 22:24:41 PDT 2004
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp, from '/Users/cheryl/Movies/quantumleap/quantumleap.mov':
  Duration: 00:43:45.7, bitrate: 1 kb/s
  Stream #0.0: Video: dvvideo, 720x480, 29.97 fps
  Stream #0.1: Audio: 0x61766476, 48000 Hz, stereo
Output #0, avi, to '/Users/cheryl/Movies/moviefast.avi':
  Stream #0.0: Video: xvid, 720x480, 29.97 fps, q=2-9, 2326 kb/s
  Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Unsupported codec (id=0) for input stream #0.1

thank you major!