I have a number of VHS and VHS-C tapes which hold family movies.

I purchased a canopus ADVC300 a few years back for purposes of ripping these VHS tapes to preserve them.

My issue is that the files are huge raw AVI files (1GB = 5 minutes of 720x480 footage) so I need to convert them.

I was thinking about Windows Media Encoder 9 to convert to WMV, but I know there are some newer video formats and containers like MKV and h264.

Any thoughts on which format I should store these in? I want to do a conversion and then delete the raw AVIs. I may back them up to multiple DVDs (as files not video) first just in case, but they take up way to much space to keep on a drive.

My goal is to preserve quality, considering these videos are from the 80s and made with an early consumer video camera, and also to maximize compatibility in the future.