I had a bit more of a look around..

John McGowan's site had a couple of converters (http://www.jmcgowan.com/aviconvert.html) - so far the converters I've tried had either left out the sound or the video.

Nope - didn't work - apparently the avi is encoded with newer codecs than those available to the converter. Might have to look at multiple steps. Haven't checked the *nix stuff out yet. Still trying to get my head around Project Builder to put front ends on stuff.

Thanks for the help though.