The Archos Multimedia Jukebox is a nice portable player but unfortunately picky when it comes to playing AVI files. Thus, here is an empirically crafted script that will encode almost any movie file to an Archos-friendly format.

The script uses mencoder from MPlayer, specifically with the following options:

mencoder -audio-preload 0 -oac copy -o OUTPUT -ovc lavc
         -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqmin=2:vqmax=20:vhq:keyint=250:vme=4:v4mv INPUT

Note: If the audio track isn’t encoded with MP3, replace -oac copy above with e.g. -oac mp3lame -lameopts preset=standard

Usage:

  make-archos-video.sh input.avi output.avi

Download: make-archos-video.sh