This forum is for questions and discussion of all the aspects of handling your footage. If you have questions about capturing/ripping footage, AviSynth, or compression/encoding/converting, look here.
I am looking for a good compression codec for .avi. I use ut video for lossless but other than that I don't know what would be recommended for compressed video. Is divx still popular?
As far as avi distro is concerned, xvid and divx are still the best choice, yes. However, you should consider using mkv or mp4 as the container and switching to some H.264 codec like x264. It's quite easy if you use zarx264gui, for example.
Normally I would use mp4 but a friend is needing this to playback through some old console he uses and said he needs avi. So that's what I'm looking for atm lol.
They're pretty much equivalent. Go for xvid, at least it's explained in the older guides (here to be exact). For other stuff do use the newer guides though.
i would recommend a high quality dimensions with an AVI codec such as Lagarith. It is a lossless codec similar to UT which then you can compress with another program such as Virtual Dub