[CALUG] christmas questions !!

[Walt Smith]

hi all,

yup, its that season... where we all need info
on how to do photo and movie stuff on linux.
 I (think) I have a couple simple Q's on movies.

I have some pix, but worse, I have some home movies
on a digital camera.  I see they are in .mov format.  
I can D/L and view in totem.. but by GOLLY are they slow
in playing on a 2.8 ghz 1 g ram machine..  mplayer does
a better job.  gnome-mplayer works as slow as totem.

but wait, I did some homework.  I have mplayer and mencode 
installed.  Haven't spent years yet examining the man pages..
But google tells me how to make a .mpg file from .mov files.
A big improvement in file size and especially play speed!!.  
Now, before I become too goood at this:

I think I'd like the option of saving .mpg or varient files to
CD (I have a few oldies, will get DVD's later ).

problem statement:
1.
I would guess I can save .mpg files and any DVD player will show a
file structure and I can play them, right ?  Would AVI be "better"
from a user sense (I'm not doing HD)? ( does mencoder do .avi ? )

2. 
I see from my DVD of Flash Gordon that it has .ifo, .bup,  and
.vob files, where .ifo's are "indexes" and .vob are "chapters"
( or some such division ). Can mencoder make a .vob file? or is 
that more in the realm of DVD editing ?  ( which I won't do ).. 
I think being able to simply plug in the CD and have it auto-
start is sometimes desirable. Which is why I asked...

3. where is the option to downconvert a .mov to say, 640 x 480
( as it converts to a mpg file, just in case I happen to record in
some HD for practice ).  yes, I know the mpg format might look 
crappy.  Perhaps I should do some intermediate convert from .mov
before doing the final file ?

 
thx, 

Walt ........