quality encoding software

hello,

i'm hoping someone can help. since virgin took sky one away from me (that will
probably only make sense to people in the uk!), i've been watching lost and 24
from here and i'm always impressed with the quality of the download. my question
is, what do people use to get the file size so low (usually about 350mb) yet the
quality so good? i have a tv tuner and when i record with it the file size is
enormous - generally 1-2gb for an hours worth of tv. what would people recommend
i use to encode these files to get a more manageable file size without losing
any noticeable quality?

thanks in advance.

s.

the latest autogk seems quite easy to use, much better than previous versions
that i've tried. it's fairly slow but is good quality (2pass xvid). the major
bonus is now you just tell it what size to make the file and it does all the
xvid codec settings for you.

doom9.org or videohelp.com/convert both have plenty of guides for converting
video. (that's where i found out about autogk.)

you can try virtualdub-mpeg with xvid.1.1.2 or divx6.

free-codecs.com / download / virtualdub-mpeg2.htm

free-codecs.com / download / koepi_xvid.htm

or

you can use mediacoder (with two pass option)

sourceforge.net / projects / mediacoder /

thanks for the pointers guys - i'll check them out 🙂

cheers.