Great tutorial! With my version of mencoder (dev-SVN-r27637-4.3-openSUSE) the mencoder command will hang indefinitely and a little spelunking has shown that that is because of the -af resample paramer. It turns out, however, that you can do away with resampling (according to the manpage it is default if needed) so taking just -af format=s16le will do the trick.
Regards, Jos.
