mkv to avi

Me and my wife decided to watch this movie for which i could only manage an mkv one. Unfortunately philips DVD player is too dumb to play mkv but avi container without any pain. Now the fight started to convert it before she comes out of kitchen and says " you couldn't even do that, what good is your ubuntu.".
After some google search and man pages i managed it and yes before she got to the yelling part.

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -of avi -o foo.avi foo.mkv