HTC Incredible :: Watching Formatted Movies On Phone?

So I tried googling and poking through a ton of different forums (this one, nexusone forums, etc.) regarding formatting video to be used on the DInc. The general consensus was to use Handbrake with the iPhone settings to convert video. But that was taking forever. What is weird is that I bought the Sandisk 32GB card, and I put a number of copies of the new season of Dr Who on it (all avi's, unsure what codecs were used for it though). They're all smaller than the native resolution of the phone (something like 366xsomething). But neither Meridian nor DoubleTwist can play them. I wasn't sure if it was card related, so I moved the files off the card onto the phone (which took forever, btw) and it still would freeze up opening the video. So I'm guessing I'm still going to have to convert the files, which is fine - but does anyone know of software better than Meridian to do so?

It's funny, I watched the entirety of Clerks on my LG Voyager (after converting it to 3gp or whatever that weird format was), and doing that seemed simpler than watching videos on my DInc. As an aside, we were watching the iPhone4 vs EVO video on my fiance's MotoDroid, standing outside a VzW store talking it up with an old co-worker of mine from when I used to work there, and the video froze. She shut it off, then turned it back on, and it started power cycling (M loop, whatever you want to call it). I spent 3 hours digging through forums looking for a way to recover her phone without factory reset, couldn't get anything to work, so we factory reset and it continued to power cycle. Totally bricked. Anyone know if this is normal?

We already ordered a replacement phone for her, as it was stock to begin with. Just find it rather weird, especially since it had happened shortly after we installed the latest version of LauncherPro on her phone. I guess the inner-troubleshooter in me is determined to figure out the cause-- especially if LauncherPro and/or YouTube interacted funny, I thought it'd be a really useful thing to give to the developers.