Best Video / Film Compression

[AJCButler]

I travel quite a bit and like to play videos on my laptop, but am not sure what the best compression format is.

Also, does anyone know of any free software available to use the compression advised?

Regards
AJ

 

[Ian]

DivX/XviD (Mpeg4) has been a very popular format for videos for many years, and media coder is a great way of converting videos to other formats/sizes:

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

edit: I've cleaned up this thread by removing some posts and reworded things a little - if people have any comments about it then please PM me