Why scale?

[Nightweaver]

Howdy, folks.

I'm not quite a newbie, but I haven't done much encoding recently and didn't want to bother the more experienced people with this question.

I've done a quick search, but couldn't find much on this topic (although I didn't look as thoroughly as I could have, so apologies if it has already been asked).

Anyway, the question:

Now that most of the MPEG-4 codecs have matured, is there any reason to scale and resize the DVD? I've noticed that XviD (at least, last time I checked) has an option for specifying the aspect ratio of the encoding job, and most modern media players seem to be able to handle this (not sure about AVI, but other containers can).

I understand that there are "scene rules", but in my case I'm just interested in having a nice backup so I don't need to keep DVD shuffling when I want to watch a TV series, or let my family watch it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[E-Male]

"scene rules" might touch rule 6, be carefull

when you reduce resolution it allows you to lower the bitrate, because there are less pixels to compress
if bitrate is not your convern, and you use AR-fixes, there is in fact no need to resize (but also none to reencode)