video problems in Ubuntu

[Douglas Pollard]

  My computer is dual core processor 2300 Mhtz 1Gig memory i686 two 250 
G  hard drives.  I have downloaded video from Internet archives. I can 
play them and put on the time line of several video editors and watch 
them. I can watch them in Mplayer and other media  I cannot render from 
any of them. Ubuntu crashes.  I have down loaded in severl different 
formats but can't e render. I am busy reading the help in the Internet 
archives and have been asking question from the video editor web sites.  
I am guessing the problems are in the down loads I have converted them 
into other formats but still no success. I doubt the problem is with 
ubuntu because this morning I  had a friend down load one of them and 
try to render them in the windows movie maker and they crashed windows 
as well.   The video is an hour long I tride rendering and saving the 
part that had rendered, the first one was 15 min. long and the rest a 
little shorter. I put them all on the editor time line and they played 
fine but still would not render.  All the files I used had been rendered 
to mpeg 2.  I have been working on this well over a week with no 
success.  Anybody got any ideas??
   I am not getting any messages saying I am running out of memory 
though that might be the problem.                                     
                                                                     Doug