MEncoder just won't work

[Mr Henderson]

I am trying to use MEncoder under Win98SE. When I try to open the programme, a window with about a dozen lines of writing flashes up briefly, and then closes. This happens with both versions I've tried: MPlayer-mingw32-1.0pre7, and MPlayer-mingw32-dev-CVS-050928. I unzipped the windows essential codecs package into MPlayer's codecs folder in both cases. I have libavcodec.dll in C:\windows\system. I know that MEncoder can run on my system, because I had MeWiG working at one stage (but it doesn't make .mpg files, which is what I need). The same thing happens with MPlayer. I've searched this site, and the MPlayer website (but the FAQs there seem to be mainly about Linux). Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

[Baldrick]

mencoder and mplayer are command line tools. Open the command prompt and type C:\location\mencoder too see what commands you can use.

Use guis like megui,mewig if you want window tools.

[Mr Henderson]

Thanks, Baldrick - that's got it started. Now to wrestle with getting it to do what I want.