I have a videocamera that uses mini-dv tapes. In the past, I've transferred the files and made DVDs, but that was time- and disk-space- consuming. I wanted to find new tools and to figure out how to convert the videos to something smaller like divx but I didn't know enough about all the different formats to answer a previous question.

Well, now I've done a bunch of research and I understand some of the details of video encoding, and in the process I wrote up some notes on the different formats involved in going from a DV videocam to divx or H.264

They're a bit rambling, but in case it's of any use, I'm going to post them as an answer. I'd be very interested in anyone else's answer as well.