[MEncoder-users] Codec for Home Movies

[Dieter]

> These tapes are irreplaceable and as 
> such I wanted a lossless codec for both audio and video.

Is there such a thing as a lossless video codec?

You could capture raw data and run it through gzip --best and see
how big the result is.   This will probably give you larger files
than you want, but would be lossless once past the A/D conversion.
Speaking of which you might need to play with contrast, saturation
and such when capturing.

> something like a 1 GB per 15mins its not very efficent.

Do you want lossless or do you want small files?

> I realize the codec for DVD is mpeg2 but I have heard its not very efficent 
> and so I was looking for something better and smaller.

Do you want DVDs that play on a standalone DVD player, or do you just
want to use DVDs as cheap media?

You could look into mpeg4 and H264.  These are said to have a better
size/quality tradeoff than mpeg2.