FFMPEG versions vs. Menpower vs. GUI4FFMPEG

[thebavarian]

I am really confused (and I am probably not the only one who is) about the different kinds of ffmpeg's and other decoders like menpower and the gui versin of the ffmpeg.. or I read somewhere here that there are even other decoders for this porpose. I am trying to watch an avi and wmv files through the MVP and it is not working at all the screen goes black for 20 sec and then comes back after which MVP restarts.
If anybody can post some working setups or link to educate myself on that topic I would really appreciate it.
Also I see that many of you guys are changing the config.xml file... is that really needed and what does it do to the transcoding ?

Thanks in advance

[stu8080]

Transcode should work out of the box. There was a reperted error in 99.5 where some lines need to be altered in config.xml, details here.