Movie Making with XP and/or Free editors

[Target]

Question about performing video captures and creating movies using WinXP:

Does XP allow you to save your movies in any format other than WMP....say like MPG or older window AVI formats? If so, are there any special tricks to doing so?

What I am wanting to do is capture a commercial and save it into an AVI file, and then combine that with another AVI to merge them together into one movie. Final output file needs to be in the older AVI file format though so that it will work on older Windows media players.

If XP cannot do this, can anybody recommend some free movie editing software I can use to edit captured AVI's (cropping from begging and end) and merge them together?

Thanks in advance.... ~Target

[muno]

Virtualdub will do avi capturing.
-M

[Target]

Thanks muno for the tip on virtualdub.

Anybody else have any suggestions or info on file formats that XP can save in?