First of all, rome-NY, there's no reason to take that tone. I'm sure beandog was trying to help in good faith (taking time out of his day to help you for free), it just so happens that his information is out-of-date.

If your player requires AVI, chances are that it can't use h.264 video - the proper AVI container doesn't support h.264, and it's a lottery as to whether your player will accept the version of AVI that has been hacked together to support h.264. Use h.264 in an MP4 (which modern hardware players will support, including current-gen games consoles), or don't use it at all.

For legacy hardware players, I would recommend MPEG4 (xvid/divx) in an AVI, as described in this blog post and this ffmpeg wiki page. An example usage would be:

Code:
ffmpeg -i input.file -c:v mpeg4 -q:v 3 -tag:v xvid -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 4 output.avi
...these options should work with avconv as well.