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I'm looking for a Linux tool that allows me to transcode videos to a video codec that is highly compatible to the Windows platform.

We produce large scientific videos from measurements and would like to show those videos during presentations and submit the videos to journals. We want to be as compatible as possible (we can not influence for example the codes installed on the presentation system or on the journal reviewers system).

Virtualdub suggests one of these codecs: * Radius Cinepak * Intel Indeo R3.2 * Microsoft Video 1

We tried ffmpeg, mencoder and Virtualdub under wine, none of those tools could produce videos encoded with the aforementioned codecs.

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You should use a standard, universally supported video format.

Academics I've worked with often have their files in MPEG-1. It has relatively low compression (big files), but is universally supported.

I recommend more modern MPEG codecs, but on old Windows installation, you would have to install a viewer such as VideoLAN to open them - MPEG-2 video and MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264 / AVC) are standard and widely supported on all modern operating systems.

All of VirtualDub's suggetsions, on the other hand, are proprietary to Windows. I would avoid using them.

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Indeed MPEG-1 is the way to go. I did not work in the beginning because windows expects MPEG-1 files not to end in .avi which makes sense I guess. Also changing the frame rate to unreasonable values (like 200) can confuse Windows Media Player (but not Linux video players). Thanks! – Sebastian Mar 29 '11 at 13:53

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