...and when I mean codecs, I mean both audio and video codecs.

I've made numerous videos in the past, at school, for school, my own interest, or sometimes just messing around with different softwares and compression tools, just to learn as much as I can, and have made two movies. What I'm wondering is what the best codecs are out there.

A recent movie I made here

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-111277754736568051&hl=en-CA

ended up being a 2.99 GB .avi file on my computer. That was encoded in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 using h264 video codec (can't remember the audio codec). Being an hour and 21 minute long video, a 3GB file size is huge compared to the file size I've seen with other movie files.

Another movie I made before the above one:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-5702394887304019642&hl=en-CA

This movie had poorer quality, it has a 2-hour and 15 minute length and it was a 800 MB file size on my computer, encoded in .wmv. The video quality sucks in this second video.

My point here is, having made these movies and other smaller videos, I've never been able to find a good-quality compression codec. I see 1 hour and 30-minute long movies having only 700MB file sizes and their quality is very good, but I can never get such a good compression.

My current knowledge tells me that DivX and h264 are the preferred video codecs, but I'm not too sure about audio codecs. Out of all the videos I've made, MPEG-3 audio codec seems to give me less trouble.

Any tips on making a 1-hour 21-minute long video under a 800MB file size?

The best one is the CCCP (combined community codec pack)
http://www.cccp-project.net/

probably you will want too the virtual dub / virtual dub mod

http://www.virtualdub.org/
http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/

as for the saving codecs, divx sure is the best, for the audio codecs you can use
check this
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1560785,00.asp
i had a DVD to divx software tutorial some time ago and they recomended on saving the audio on AAC format. however i havent done that many rippings to know much about it.

I am far from an expert on the topic in any way, but I have found that the XVID codec in ffmpeg (available free for virtually all platforms) gives a pretty good quality/compression ration. For the audio I generally use mp3 or mp4 (AAC). I'm not sure if these are really the best, just my own trial and error experiments.

I'm actually curious if there are any experts out there that could recommend not only the codecs they use, but general bit-rate settings, etc.

I myself using the K-Lite Codec Pack.
Is maybe bigger as the CCCP, but also more features.

For audio using the good old mp3, but at least 192kb bitrate. Has the best compatibilty from all. AAC has bigger compress rate tough.

A little stuff: (but I'm also not a expert, just some experience)

From video the best compress rate was by the Real Media 10 (.rmvb). The same quality xvid was almost a half bigger. (103 MB to 197 MB). But the only video player whas played it was the VLC Media Player.

Also very good quality/compress rate has the Matroska Video (.mkv), but having higher requirements for hardware. And don't dream to play it ony a normal DVD Player. Uses the known codec h264. Very good support of dual audio!
Used mostly by anime fansubs.

Avi (DivX/Xvid) is the most popular and with best compatibilty. The old DivX 3,4
aren't too good ones, but Xvid or DivX 6 rocks. The most stuff is in this format.

MP4 should be next format, but his appareance looks a bit slow. Dunno why.
I was satisfied with every his stats, mostly in the good compress rate.

Wma in my opinion has the best video quality from all. Don't has so extreme compress rate tough as MP4 or Real Media, but is still in ok. Just a very litle bigger as
Xvid.

Ogm - Ogg Media files was used for the first Dual Audio videos, mostly for anime fansubs. Not very bad but big file size. Replaced with the h264/Mkv

Mpeg - Video format by microsoft, also used on DVDs. Good quality, but poor compression

Other - .asf, .rm, and etc. Not recommended.

For video my choice is MP4,Wmv or Xvid, since they can be played on normal DVD players. (just a few supports them all 3)

K-Lite Codec Pack rocks a lot, I would recommend it. You can get it free too! Just google k-lite codec or go to some site like codecguide.com

The best video codec for space-saving encoding would be H264, the fastest largest most worthwhile being MPEG2, and the middleman being Xvid/DivX. The best audio codec is AAC, hands down.

Take a visit to the Doom9 forums, and lurk for around a week and you'll get the gist of encoding possibilities.
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Now, recommendations. meGUI should do well for anything provided you have Avisynth experience (which I doubt since you're new to this). Learning to use Avisynth is crucial when entering the encoding 'scene', as almost all the tools use it at one time or another. Use H264 only for archive or size-dependent MKV/MP4 distribution purposes, as a 1:30 video would take very, very long to encode. I'd say maybe half a day with an E6600. Otherwise, use Xvid for a good balance between quality and size. 700MB will encode a SD-DVD into a great Xvid AVI. As for audio, use AAC always. Usually just do a low-complexity 96kpbs, as that turns out to be something kind of equivalent to a 196kbps MP3.
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Jebus, 3GB for a H264 video? I'd excpect maybe 600MB; lower the bitrate to the single thousands.

The codecs that works very well may be is the K-Lite Codec Pack.

But for compression features and video editing, there special programs and means $$$

K-Lite Codec
Beacuse it's free and give several enough codec for almost any video format.

Misinformation ITT.

Anyway, I just use Media Player Classic Home Cinema (non-"official" build) and the latest versions of Quicktime Alternative and the FFDShow beta, myself. Anything that doesn't use soft subs gets opened in Windows Media Player, since MPC is a buggy piece of shit (but man, that 1920x1200 subtitle rendering is great).

For audio, I just use Foobar 2000. I can use my ASIO driver with it, it supports most major formats right out of the box (.FLAC, .WAV and .MP3 are the only commonly used formats on my computer, but it handles a bunch of less popular ones too), it takes almost no resources, and is highly customizable. I do wish it wasn't so limited in sampling rates for ASIO though.

The mkv container for h264 is awesome, but mp4 also supports multiple channels... personally, h264 is awesome. :D

I suggest H264. It has better compression over DivX (at least for version 5.x and I haven't seen many people using 6.) Currently, I'm using x264 with meGUI and it works fine.

For audio, I suggest AAC or Vorbis. They are very close. Just choose whatever you like.

The quality of the resulting file depends on bit rate and the setting you use when encoding. Higher bit rate will result in a bigger file but higher quality. Higher setting will take longer time during encoding but result in a higher quality video.

You can make your video any size you want by controlling the bit rate. If you want your video to be under 800MB then just lower your bit rate. Normally, encoders with gui usually have built-in bit rate calculator. You can use that to calculate the proper bit rate.

I suggest x264 and its GUI MeGUI for their easy operation and good compression.

CCCP pack is one of the best i know
combining with the media players VLC media player and Neuview media player you have everything you practically need. (neuview is for people with pimped up pc's though, they are made to run movies with pixelfusion which needs quite heavy work on graphic cards and processors)

Hmmm, I personally perfer mp4 over mkv if there's no absolute need to use the latter because mp4 is better supported by devices other than pc...
As technology develops, portable devices will have more and more processing power...As far as i know PSP can play 720x480 video? not very sure. But if the container is not supported then you can never watch it.

For mp4 to work on portable devices, etc, you have to put restriction on h264 (AVC Level) or they won't be able to keep up with the rendering. And as technology develops, I believe there will be more support for Matroska. (Well, now TCPMP on my PPC supports Matroska and so do several hi-end Harddrive-based multimedia players I've seen on the market.)

I prefer Matroska because it looks like mp4 does not support vorbis. (at least, the auto-encode function in megui won't let me mux vorbis in a mp4 container)