Rich's Tongfamily

Doom9.net – Ogg Vorbis Guide. One thing that is pretty neat is if you use Ogg Vorbis, a much more efficient encoding, rather than MP3 for Xvid movies. Here’s the guide from Doom9.
So, the state of the “art” open source movie uses the open source xvid codec and then the ogg vorbis encoder/decoder. I just created an ogm file (Ogg Movie file) with The Commitments and it sounds pretty darn good. The audio is 165MB in Dolby AC3 at 48kHz sampling at 192Kbps and this is compressed into a 83MB Ogg Vorbis file running at 96Kbps
Then the MPEG2 encoding used on a DVD results in 3GBs worth of data, this becomes a Xvid file that is 1.3GB with no perceptible loss of quality at least to my ears.
Net, net, you end up with a 1.4GB file so you get a 50% compression and no loss of quality that I can tell. BTW, the way that you play this back is by downing the Ogg Vorbis Directshow filters so it can be played back in Windows Media Player or just about anything that uses Directshow. Xvid has a simmilar player in something called ffdshow that you also get from the Gordian Knot codec pack. Amazing what technology can do. Although a little complicated for the average human!