Having problems with my .MKV conversion (to .AVI)

[triptiks]

So, I'm kind of a "newbie" at this and don't have a lot of technical knowledge but I'm going to try and describe my problem here:

I have a 720p HD movie and, naturally, it's in .MKV format. I've attempted to run it through ffmpegX a couple times in an effort to get it into .AVI format but when I click "Encode", it loads briefly and then *ding* it says it's done. It happens almost instantly.

However, there isn't an .AVI coming out of it. It just doesn't do anything.

I've had limited success with the XviD codec: it produced a 720p resolution file, in AVI, with the audio and video tracks in tact, but the video doesn't play fully. I can seek forward, and it will give me the snapshot of that frame, but the video will not actually play through. The audio seems fine.

Also, I tried to get it into .MP4 format with the mpeg-4 encoder (this was my first attempt) and ended it early because I just wanted to see if it worked. I had a short file, maybe the first 10-15 mins, and it was going great... however, when I tried to re-do it and let it encode the whole way, at the end it *dings* and OS X tells me "ffmpegX has timed out" or something, and the file is unplayable.

Currently I am using waiting for the process to finish on the H.264 encoder but needless to say, I'm not holding out much hope.

Please, if you can, try to help me. I'll be checking the thread regularly to answer any questions you may have.

Thanks for your time.

[triptiks]

Also, don't know what this means but I'll put it up anyway.

I checked in the Progress Window, and clicked the little information "i" button. It seems my console is saying this over and over:

[matroska @ 0x5597b8]FIXME: implement support for BlockDuration
[h264 @ 0x54340c]AVC: Consumed only 24 bytes instead of 1097753632
Error while decoding stream #0.0

edit: also the numbers of bytes, above, is always different. Is this normal? Am I paranoid?

[triptiks]

Oh man!! I might be making the (what I assume is) infamous "frame rate" goof!! I feel like such a fool! Haha, I guess I should laugh about it.

If switching it to NTSC Film fixes my "frozen frame" problem I'm gonna feel like such an idiot.