What format, DVD, mp4, this that what?

[overloaded_ide]

Ok, I been mastering DVDs, capturing, ripping, burning etc... for along time now but not recently.

Now I want to just store a ton of stuff on a big drive and watch on PC 19" LCD with 6.1 surround sound! I'd like to shove all my movies on one drive for traveling and not mess with disks.
What to do?

Just shrink a bunch of dvd movies smaller and smaller till I start getting bad video then use a bit less compresion? Maybe find a set point like 50% or so where the DVD still looks good on the monitor and just use that setting for all of them? Keep the DVD format so I can use Power DVD player which I like.

Is there a better format that would give great results and even smaller files, has a decent player for on the pc or would still work with Power DVD? I don't use windows media crap even though I use W2K.

Other than straight video as raw AVI or MP2 or DVD in vobs I have not done much for awhile, and not much of those recently. I have not played with MP4 at all yet, nor DivX etc...

I generally don't like stuff that uses codecs, I geuss just bad luck with freeware video stuff I never got to work cause I could not find the right codecs, so that kinda turns me off on that. Something that just WORKS would be good, like DVD just works with any DVD player. Nothing extra needed, no downloads required, and it works on any system with a DVD player, nothing to figure out or search for etc... and anyone can use it anytime.

[redwudz]

I generally use Divx or Xvid, take your choice. If you use Divx player compatible settings, you would have the ability to play back on a Divx set top player.

I use FairUse Wizard most of the time for DvD to Divx or Xvid. Or AutoGK is another. And there are a few more 'all-in-one type converters. Not required, but a lot easier than 'rolling your own'. About 1500Kbps gives you a fairly good quality.

If you wanted higher compression, maybe X264 or similar, but they take a lot of CPU power to encode and decode, along with a fair amount of time.