[Hampshire] Video compression

Hi all

Anybody know what the best compression results for video are? I've had a very quick play with wmv and it looks about 15Mb a minute but what could I expect from DivX, mpg and other codecs etc?

The reason I ask is I still have a load of VHS tapes that I'd like to digitise - approximately 400 I reckon and most of them are full up at 4 hours each. As you can imagine, we're looking at a lot of storage - around 1.4Tb in wmv if my maths is right.

Is there anything out there significantly better?

Cheers
Rob