After some frustrating hours of debugging I found out that my code was not being able to read the AVI file because I was using a opencv built without the gstreamer-devel package (among others).  It was a bit of a pain to find out because when I executed the command it just stopped.  Did not return any error or warning message.  I had to uninstall the opencv that I had built, install the one offered by fedora13, get the error code and then correct my opencv package.  I have now created a new opencv package containing opencv 2.1.0 for fedora 13 [1]

The difference with the original fedora 13 package is that mine forces the use of the following devel packages:

ffmpeg-devel >= 0.4.9
gstreamer-devel
xine-lib-devel

Any changes to my spec file or patches are greatly appreciated.  Have not seen this pop up in the development branch for fedora.  Will keep my eyes open to see what they come up with.