[madzilla]

Yes yes i know you can take a video that has been downloaded off of the internet and it will play it rather well. But I am more interested in compressing the video to an appropriate filesize without losing picture quality (that is noticeable on the TP) and have it play as smooth as possible. I could waste hours encoding videos and going with trial and error but I wanted to get some input from people who may have already done some trial and error. So my question is what encoding settings have seemed to be the best for you guys? also what encoders do you all prefer?