Lt Jim: You can use FCheck (found in the startmenu together with Maya) to batch convert all of your images. Open your animation in there and then save it using another format such as jpeg. For future referens I do recommend you render out to .tga (targa) at first instead. Targa has better quality than jpeg and jpeg can also give you artifacts on images.

The Xvid codec can be found here and Virtualdub here. I highly suggest than you follow my previously posted steps after installing these since that will give a very small video in the end.

Hope that helps

skywola: Even if Maya had the option to render to mpeg you shouldn't use it for the same reason you shouldn't render straight to avi.