v 5.1 of the DivX codec is a gem of an MPEG4 implementation - aside from producing pictures that are visibly better than Xvid or Windows Media 9 (for similair bitrates) it has a great status display when it is encoding - you can really see what the codec is up to with motion vectors overlaid on the picture, a picture difference display (you realise how little goes on between frames in a video sequence) and an moving graph of several bitrate-related parameters - a lesson in digital video itself. Screenshot here