[hopenhower]

yeltzin_4, I was talking about the older VHS tape sources, not DV sources. With a 2 hr VHS being turned into a two layer DVD, you are making the file much larger than it has to be to have the same video quality. I would guess that a 1 gig XVID would have the same quality as an entire VHS tape. The hardware to play XVID's is readily available with the newer dvd players. They're only $125 or so. If anyone spends a lot of time transcoding, I suggest they get one and you will never have to spend hours transcoding again. You will also save in blank DVD media since you can get a lot more on a DVD (I would guess about 8 VHS tapes on a dual layer DVD without losing quality).
brimstone, if someone didn't have one of the DVD players that can play computer video files and they did need to transcode it, it wouldn't be an uneccesary loss in quality. When you download it as a video DVD, it already has been transcoded, and thus the loss is already there. As far as individually authored DVD's coming into circulation that are sub-quality, that problem is always going to be there, just like someone changing audio files to mp3s.
It just seems like it would be much faster downloading and uploading without much loss. It would also have a lot of benefits for DV sourced videos as well.