Is there a way to encode a whole film then playback it like a DVD skipping from a chapter to another without splitting the final avi file into several chapters?

Maybe using a sort of cue sheet file?

You need to store your movie in a ogm or matroska container. To do this download a program called ChaperXtractor and get the chapters from the ifo. If you want to use ogm then download virtualdubmod and input the file under streams > video chapters. To playback you will need the OggDS found at http://tobias.everwicked.com if you want to create a matroska file then use mkvmerge to create it http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolni...c/mkvmerge.html it should explain how do to this in the readme. For playback use gabest's wonderful matroskasplitter found here, http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ oh yeah and you will need a player capable of putting these chapters in a menu so you can switch chapters (at least for matroska), I recommend mpc also found on gabest's site.

Thank you Bonzi, but don't you know if exist a way of doing it simply using a file that contains the time for each chapter, so that the player can skip at that exact time?
I think this would be a simply way with no need of using no "avi+mp3audio" files (the standard Divx format).
Maybe some players support a sort of playlist files, like the m3u file used in winamp for mp3s?

I believe bsplayer can do something like this though I have never used it, http://www.bsplayer.org/ although the website seems to be down. Anyway, when you extract the chapters in ChapterXtractor set the format to BSPlayer and save it as .chf and then load it into bsplayer.