Imagine that you have a path to video file in your database. That file downloads perfectly through the web-face, but your mencoder-wrapper fails to convert it.
Both wrapper-script and web-face take the path from the same place/field/table/database/row/whatever :)
Detailed look at the logs from mencoder and... file not found!
Try downloading again and take a preciser look at the url:
http://altervideos.ru/video/Theatre%20of%20Tragedy%20-%20Let%20You%20Down.MPG
Nothing strange. Really?
Except that "%20" are not the converted spaces :) They were stored as is in the database! For sure real file-name was with spaces and my browser automatically converted them back to spaces also!
