Converting HD to XVid - looking for suggestions

[wtg]

So I'm just getting into HD video and absolutely love the quality, but I don't love the disk size. I just can't afford 20 GB per movie so I'm looking for a good way to convert them to XVid or other compressed, high-quality format.

While I've used a number of different tools to convert SD video to XVid and have settled on mencoder in those circumstances, I've not done anything with HD and don't have a good feel for what options would give the best results, as I'd like to preserve the full resolution and AC3 sound. I'm only interested in the highest quality since I'll only convert videos I intend to keep and watch again, so I'm not all that concerned about how long it takes. Even with SD video, testing different encoder options can take a long time just because of the processing time involved, so instead of spending an inordinate amount of time trying a bunch of different options I'm not all that familiar with and reviewing lousy results, I figured some of you have already done all of this and could offer some suggestions.

I'm open to any tools or even format if your experience shows something to be best. It doesn't have to be mencoder or XVid.

[nitrogen_widget]

I always used AutoGK.
However, when I set the minimum width I found it hard to keep the height of the video from going higher than 480.

So I just let it do what it wanted & it would shrink the video marginally which didn't look too bad when re-watched.

I've started playing with mediacoder & h264 / x264
mediacoder.sourceforge.net

And I'm starting to like it.
A very large amount of options.
One of those options is the ability to set the finished resolution.

As far as I can tell, x264/h264 will give me a better picture than XVID if you keep the source resolution & keep the end file sizes roughly the same.

This means I can use x264 to get a smaller file size with less loss in quality.
This is only for SD & i'm still tweaking though.

[herbs]

I use mediacoder works fine for me. see http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

[wtg]

I have not seen mediacoder before... it looks very nice. Any recommendations on settings for converting HD?

[wtg]

Hmmm... Mediacoder is a nice interface, but it doesn't necessarily make coming up with good encoding setting any easier. As simply a front-end to a variety of encoders, you still have tons of options without any real guidance on how to set them. *sigh*

Darn... I was hoping I wouldn't have to spend the same amount of time trying different HD encoding options as I did for SD.

[nitrogen_widget]

I just discovered AUTOmkv.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=113811

It has presets for converting video.
I don't know what they all mean yet, however it looks fairly simple use.
Kind of like AutoGK but with x264 support.