I've never really given this much thought until recently, so I'm curious what others have to say. Ever since I started tinkering with HTPC's almost 5 years ago, I have always encoded my TV shows I want to save into divx. 300 megs for a 30 min show and 600 for 1 hour. Since I was pretty much only saving animated comedies (South Park, Family Guy, Simpsons), I noticed no real quality loss, even on my 52 inch plasma, and the space saving was nice. Recently I have been getting into saving some other shows (Burn Notice, House) and am wondering if I should save to a better format. I don't believe divx does true 5.1 sound and when it comes to shows with some action, I think the quality may leave a little to be desired. The space doesn't bother me nowadays with hard drives so cheap, so I am curious now what others do. 5 years is a lot in the computer world and I'm sure I'm behind on this one. I was thinking of just encoding the .vobs of the dvd into a dvr-ms file like I do for my dvd's. Definitely quicker than encoding to divx. Are there any other pluses?