Creating a slide show shouldn’t be this hard

What I want to do seems simple enough.  Given a collection of image files, create a slide show video suitable for sending via email or posting on YouTube.   There are countless GUI programs that will do this.  But I want to do it from the command line under program control.

Finding a suitable Windows program to do this is turning out to be very difficult.  I first tried a Windows build of ffmpeg, which is apparently the program under Linux.  The three Windows builds I tried are badly broken, either crashing or rejecting valid command lines.  I thought I’d try mencoder (part of the MPlayer project), but the Windows MPlayer build that I downloaded doesn’t appear to include mencoder.

Somebody else suggested x264, but my experience with that has been fruitless as well.  Unless you consider frustration fruitful.

I’m stumped.  All I want is a program that I can point to a directory and say, “Make a slide show from all those images.”  This isn’t rocket science, and yet every program I’ve tried has failed.

If you have any suggestions for a command line program that will create a slide show from multiple .jpg files and save it to a common video format (.avi, .mp4, .flv, .swf, etc.), I’d be real happy to hear about it.  But, please, don’t recommend Linux, BSD, or some other operating system.  This must be a Windows solution.