Video translation magic

[colet at code-energy.com (Cole Tuininga)]

Hey all - 

Per some suggestions on this group (and the GNHLUG list), I decided to
take a little of my holiday gift money and purchase a Hauppauge MediaMVP
(http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_mediamvp.html) to attach
to my TV, with the idea of taking some of the video files on my home
fileserver (Ok, my Doctor Who videos) and being able to watch them on
the TV.  

I got the box, and since I didn't want to have to run a Windows machine
just to power the box, I set up the mvpmc project
(http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main) on the fileserver (which
is incidentally running Debian Sarge).  It works great - the Hauppage
box boots off an image from the fileserver that it retrieves via bootp,
and then nfs mounts the remote filesystem.  Nice.

Here's the problem.  The Hauppage box itself only supports mpeg1/2
encoded videos and I've got a variety of formats ranging from vob's, to
mov's, to asf's, wmv's, and avi's.

I've tried looking at (and playing with) ffmpeg and transcode, and I
just don't understand this stuff well enough to figure out how to
translate the files to the proper formatting.

I was wondering if some kind soul out there knew the magic commands to
take a given file and translate it to mpeg1/2?

Many many thanks in advance to anybody who can help...

-- 
"The memory management on the power pc chip is something that should be
shown to small children when they've been especially bad." -Linus Torvalds

Cole Tuininga
Lead Developer
Code Energy, Inc
colet at code-energy.com
PGP Key ID: 0x43E5755D