OT: What's a good video compression program?

[shinigami]

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
I like xvid, personally.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

...Isn't xvid a compression type?

[Fyron]

Yes, and of those listed thus far, Super can make use of it.

Xvid is a better format than Divx in pretty much every way (excepting some weird DVD hardware players that can support Divx movie files...). The latest MPEG4 standard, h.264, provides even better quality encodings at smaller file sizes. It comes at the cost of rather high CPU usage to encode and to play back, however. My 2ghz core 2 duo laptop occasionally stutters playing 720p movie files upscaled to 1080p resolution on a hdtv, for example. It plays fine if I set the res to 720p though, for no scaling. h.264 is good for HD movie encoding, but kind of excessive for regular DVDs, tv card captures, and other lower resolution sources.

I'd recommend against any sort of Windows media encoding, even without considering any potential technical defects. The MS codec teams have been colossal dicks in the past, even going so far as to (unofficially) hint at patent infringement against the dev of VirtualDub over his implementation of ASF encoding (resulting in it being dropped from the app). link

Maybe you should try some apps out already?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Perhaps.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

'Super' keeps on erroring out.