Best AVI/mpeg compression software?

I' looking for something that can compress my avi's and mpegs down
to about 1 meg per minute, or at least something a little more reasonable
than ~350 megs for a 27 minute file.

Quality loss is not really an issue. I have an full 25 episode of Hand Maid may that is only 50 megs, but I cannot find the compressor that did it.

Use the DivX5 or XVID codec, use Virtualdub to process AVIs. Resize the AVIs to 320x240 or even 240x180 (that way you still keep enough detail in the frames to read subtitles, etc, but don't force the compressor to encode huge swathes of pixels, causing the frame to break down into horrible macroblocks). For better quality, use two-pass variable bit-rate encoding. The audio is also a consideration here. You can reduce the audio down in Virtualdub simultaneously with the video recompression. Change it to mono and drop the sample rate to 22050, then use whatever codec takes your fancy to recode the audio using just a quarter or less of the bitrate of the full-quality audio (eg. you could get away with 128kbps MP3 audio, but after halving the sample rate and changing to mono, you can use 32kbps or less).