Hi,

What is the best approach for compressing digital camera video to something much more compressed, for archival purposes. Here is what I know:

My camera is a CoolPix 7600. It ends up as a .mov file (mp4? Quicktime? whatever?). It is extremely unefficient as 15 minutes requires one gigabyte memory. This is no good.

First, what is the best all around compressed video format for this purpose? Something that will not pass out of the mainstream too soon. I'm thinking Divx. I want to put onto CD rom and get maybe 30 minutes or an hour of video per disk.

I want the video or audio quality not to be discernibly diminished, although it was not the best as you can imagine, coming from a pocket camera.

And last, what software is recommended? Something simple, cheap, free.

Thanks
Jaymz