Best Codec?

[Heinkel]

Whats the best codec to use, that gives decent quality, but doesn't take forever to encode.

I have been using DivX 5, and it does come out nice, but it encodes very slowly (took about 20-25 mins to encode 4 mins of .ahf film).

What does everyone use?

[AKIron]

I've found that Helix Producer (was called Real Producer and basic is free) gives best quality for file size. I never liked real player but it's hard to argue with the quality to size ratio.

http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/basic.html