Convert .mov to .avi - Linux

I have a digital camera that creates .mov files for videos. It's terrific but I cannot watch the videos (.MOV) that I capture with the camera on our living-room DVD player. However, like many recent DVD players, it will play .avi files. So I use this handy command that I ripped off in its entirety, some time ago. It will make separate .mp3 and avi files for your enjoyment:

$ for fl in YOURMOVFILE.MOV
do
  mencoder ${fl} -o ${fl/mov/avi} -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc
  mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -vc dummy -dumpaudio -dumpfile ${fl/mov/mp3} ${fl/mov/avi}
  #rm ${fl/mov/avi}
done

Output

Of course, you need mplayer and mencoder installed.

ffmpeg is perfectly up to this task as well, although I think mencoder is a little faster. The syntax that I have been using (specifying a 60FPS frame rate) is the following:

$ ffmpeg -i file-name.mov -g 60 -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 file-name.avi

This works a charm and really shrinks the file size. My original 17 second clip in its original .mov file format weighed in at 8.5MB. Following conversion the avi clip weighed in at 855.5KB.

Of course, the conversion has a degenerative affect on playback, towit, it might look pretty bad stacked up against the original, but that's what you get. If you know a better way, or better ffmpeg conversion syntax, then hook us all up.