The error message occures after the “output options” pop up and before the “AVI options” pop up, so I don’t get the chance to try different codec. I did find an old thread on what seemed to be the same problem and tried 1. Turning off Hardware Acceleration, 2. Changing the screen size 3. reinstalling pI. Another thread suggested going to an earlier version of the video driver, which is the last resort as I had to update all the hardware drivers to get the laptop to work with the video projector we use to show the slides I would like the pI backgrounds for. So I may be at an impass here. Any other ideas?