Car stereo, what codec to use...?

(Not sure if this would go in here...)

I bought a cheap, chinese, navigation head unit off of amazon and it works fantastic, plays pretty much everything up to DVDs. When I try to play an .avi though, it gets really picky.

It's a windows CE 6.1 based unit though I'm not sure if the media player is winCE based.

It can play older (6-8 years old?) .avi files I have lying around but I can't seem to encode other videos to those playable parameters properly as the best my re-encodes ever do is play audio (no video).

Here's the media info from an .avi that it will play:
[spoiler]
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 175 MiB
Duration : 22mn 38s
Overall bit rate : 1 082 Kbps
Writing application : Lavf52.31.1

Video
ID : 0
Format : xvid
Codec ID : xvid
Duration : 22mn 38s
Bit rate : 941 Kbps
Width : 512 pixels
Height : 384 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.200
Stream size : 152 MiB (87%)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Mode extension : MS Stereo
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 22mn 38s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 20.7 MiB (12%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.58 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 45 ms
Writing library : LAME3.98

[/spoiler]

I've tried using "handbrake" and "format factory" with about 30-40 different video codec configurations with no success. Do I need to use an older encoding app or uninstall my codecs and install older ones?

There is very little info about this particular unit on the web. I wish I could find the magic codec combination/encoding app so I could encode some stuff to have in the car on a thumb drive or SD card.

Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. :)

Car stereo, what codec to use...?