I have used mencoder and it works great if you specify a slow framerate. The mpeg2 encoder doesn't support this, but this is not an issue now

The main problem seems that you can not pipe encoded video from mencoder to another process. AISI this is because of the demands of encoding (i.e writing to headers at the end of processing video).
I was hoping to stream jpg's direct from file without creating an intermediate video file. So I hope to try encoding to a raw video stream, using mencoder, then pipe this to vlc.
I'm unsure (if in fact possible) how I pipe output from mencoder and whether, say, vlc accepts it as input.