I don't know what the problem is. Almost every AVI file I try to open, it says it doesn't recognize that AVI file type. How do I fix this?
Well mencoder can convert just about any video to an animated gif. No options for configuring the gif output (colour map, etc.). You might want to try converting the avi to raw RGB. If it can't handle that, then there is something definatly up. Could be that it uses VfW and you don't have VfW decoders installed. For playback generally dshow decoders are used.