[Hot Stott Bot]

As the man pointed out earlier, H.264 with AAC is what you want.

That's pretty much as good as it gets.

So, aside from using H.264, if you really want to get it lower... you could convert the frame rate to something lower with blending and whatnot... you could interlace it... you could lower the resolution... free tools (VirtualDub yay!) will do all of that for you with the highest quality.

Once you've done that, then compress it.

Converting to H.264 is kind of a mess these days. QuickTime Pro is really the easiest way to do it, quite honestly, but there are free tools out there too...

[Hot Stott Bot]

No.

XviD is a mediocre format compared to H.264.

Use H.264.

QuickTime Pro is a piece of software that can convert video to H.264.

It does a fine job at it.

Using some free software to convert to H.264 wouldn't be any different than using QuickTime Pro to do it -- except the latter would be simpler.

[Hot Stott Bot]

Last I tried ffmpegX I remember it being a big pain in the ass.

Mainly, I remember having to install lots of other software and point ffmpegX to all of it and finding that a little annoying. Though that was a long time ago and I haven't had a chance to use it since...

...still nicer than all the windows solutions I suppose.

I dunno, might be nicer now!

[Hot Stott Bot]

Yeah, that's why you would select the option to save it an MPEG-4 container instead.