Thanks manono - that's what I thought. An intermediate, smaller AVI file would not help matters. Although if I want to keep a smaller, manageable AVI to watch on my computer I should also do this. By the way - my three-hour recording took up 140GB of space using Lagarith
I'm trying to use VirtualDub to recode, but it does not appear to list many of the codecs which I have on my system. For example, I have xvid - but it does not show in the list when I go to the Video menu and select "Compression". Any idea why this might be? And yes - I do have xvid for encoding and not just for decoding, because it shows up in other programs as a choice to use for encoding.