audio only with wizard

[clarkepeters]

using ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron)
Whenever I try to use the wizard to save a video, I get audio only even though I mark both the audio and video. I never had this problem in the past.

For example, I want to convert an avi file to mpeg. The video plays perfectly in VLC, so I know VLC and the video are compatible. So I select,
--transcode/save to file
--use existing playlist item
--transcode video mpeg-1 video
--transcode audio mpeg audio
--mpeg-ps
--give file a name

this has always worked for me in the past. I don't know when or why it stopped working.

How do I go about debugging this or narrowing down the problem? Maybe I should test it with command line, but I don't know how to do that (that's why I like the wizard so much).

I know there are alternate ways to convert video via ffmpeg or mencoder (which is what I'm reverting to, for now),
but I like my VLC

[clarkepeters]

Okay, so the problem isn't consistent with all videos. I'm not sure what the source was of my past videos that erred, but the latest one was a clip I made with Avidemux. So I'm not sure if it's a problem with any avi file or just that Avidemux corrupts the file so far as VLC transcoding is concerned.

For testing, I took the Avidemux clip and made a copy of it with ffmpeg, like so:
ffmpeg -i AvidemuxClip.avi -sameq output.mpg

then I opened output.mpg with VLC and tested the wizard.
It worked fine, saved video and audio alike, however it was grainy by the time of the third conversion.
Of course, there was no purpose of making the copy with VLC other than for testing purposes.

Still, seems to me that any file that can be played properly in VLC should also be capable of being transcoded through the wizard.

I prefer VLC because I don't seem to get as much quality loss as when I make a copy/transcode with ffmpeg.