Just a quick note for those interested in video compression: The folks over at DivX are giving away free DivX Pro licenses for an unspecified limited time. While the DivX player has always been free of charge, you'll need the Pro version if you want to create your own DivX files.
The suite is normally priced at $19.99 and includes the DivX Converter, DivX Pro Codec, DivX Player, and DivX Web Player. The DivX holiday promotion is available for both Windows and Mac users. While DivX has long been renowned for its video quality, its open source equivalent Xvid is also freely available for download and is said to produce similar or even better quality output compared to DivX.