Better quality- .mpg or .avi?

[Pericles]

I recently ripped all of my vcds because of their unacceptable quality and now have them on my hd as .mpg files. They were originally .avi files before I started the conversion/encoding to vcd process and were smaller files than their .mpg equivalents. What I'm wondering is, should I bother converting them back to .avi with VDub if they will be smaller files? Will the quality of these files in .avi be better than their current .mpg state?
Thanks in advance.

[teegee420]

Quality will either remain the same or deteriorate slightly. depending on the bitrate you use. If you ask me it's not worth the conversion time unless you must conserve every last megabyte of your hard drive.

[jimmalenko]

A few things;

1. The quality ain't gonna get better.
2. AVI codecs are able to get greater compression than MPEG - hence you can have two files with the exact same length being two vastly different file sizes.
3. filesize has jackshit to do with quality without considering point 2 above.
4. A re-encode never improves quality.