The idea of “preserving” and “gathering” the CutScenes from FMV is not a bad idea,
but the concept of " converting them to modern standards" as stated in the opening,
is quite not needed and above all destructive of the already low quality of the source.
Moreover, the codecs used in the cutscens are almost all known (there are 3 or 4 at max)
and available to be readily played installing a CodecPack.
A forked idea from this that could have more sense is to convert and organize
all the cutscenes (or whatever extra video present)
in a LOSSLESS video codec like Huffyuv (wich is well supported by FFMpeg) + a lossless audio codec like FLAC.
That would have sense, so the (low) quality could be preserved intact and easily playable with a single modern codec.
If such a project would really start, with a public storage DB to put the .avi in (categorized with informations etc…)
i would glady contribute with the conversion of the FMV isos i have.
So good luck!
EDIT:
I’ve done some conversion test with FFMPEG on my Phantasmagoria (ita lang) iso
ffmpeg -i F:\VMD\740.VMD -vcodec huffyuv -acodec flac -compression_level 12 test.avi
The result is neat and clean perfect!
EDIT 2:
Or much more better with x264 in lossless mode (the resulting file size is hugely smaller)
ffmpeg -i F:\VMD\740.VMD -vcodec libx264 -preset placebo -qp 0 -acodec flac -compression_level 12 test.mkv