I've tried to render my 60 second movie (in all formats) and when I go to play it in any of the players it will either play a blank screen or only the first 1 second of my movie.
I have Pentium 4, 256MB RAM...a brand new machine.
Is it possible you have a loop region set in your project? This would be
indicated by a blue bar near the top of the timeline with little triangles at
the ends pointing down at the events. If you have a loop region set, the
default action of the render process is to render only that region instead
of the entire project. Make sure you remove the checkmark from
"Render Loop Region Only" before you start rendering.