Best Quality Settings for a DVD/Mini DV conversion to Xvid?

[dznutz1]

Hello, sorry if a stupid question as I've searched the board endlessly. I am new to mac and FFMPEGX. I experimented w/ different settings and XVID AVI seems to look best to me. I have a Mini DV AVI over 2 gigs that I want to reduce in size to keep on my hardrive, but keep the quality of picture and size the same, is that possible? I know whenver you convert or compress you loose some quality, but i've seen some divx or xvid movies that look amazing. I am really just trying to keep it as close to the original file as far as quality goes as possible, but have a smaller file to take up less space on my hard drive.
Thank you very much.

[major]

To get maximum quality, you should encode with the same image size as your source file. Make a test with a small file (or cancel the encoding after two minutes) and check if the result is satisfactory.

[dznutz1]

Thank you very much, would that be done in bitrate or?

[major]

By image size I mean the width, and the height. The bitrate should get adjusted automatically when you click the "Best" button in the video tab.

[dznutz1]

Cool thanks. Handbrake worth a shot?