OK, I have gotten MPlayer to encode videos as a straight across the board conversion from:
Huffy 29.97fps with PCM audio @ 44100 2channel 174k/bps
to
Divx4 29.97fps with MP3 audio @ 44100 2channel 18k/bps (I think, I have to wait till I get home to find out)

While this is all peachy and cool and all, I need to be able to deinterlace the output. The man page says to avoid it in Divx4 as it is buggy.

Does anyone know the happy little option that will deinterlace my video?

here is what I have been using:

$ mencoder /mnt/Jester/RawData/misc/tecline.edit.avi -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame -lameopts q=9:mode=0 -o frameno.avi &&

> mencoder /mnt/Jester/RawData/misc/tecline.edit.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=16637:keyint=250:vme=4 -oac copy -o movie.avi -pass 1 &&

> mencoder /mnt/Jester/RawData/misc/tecline.edit.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=16637:keyint=250:vme=4 -oac copy -o movie.avi -pass 2