What is the best video codec to use for videos?

Just to be clear, these are videos I intend to keep on my hard drive, so it has to be rather compressed.


Things I am looking for:


1) compression


2) quality


3) ease of use


4) compatibility


5) playability





I don't want some obscenely large video file, as DV AVI or uncompressed AVI would give me. I don't want a video file that loses significant amounts of quality when compressed (some lose colorspace information, mpeg-4 loses detail when there are dark colors in the video, mpeg-1 tends to have weird frame skips and quality loss with my encoder, etc.). Some have glitches, create an interlaced effect, or something of that nature. I need this video file to be easy to access with burners, video editors, video converters, etc. And finally, I need to be able to play the video easily and universally (on other peoples' computers) without having to install bunches of proprietary codecs, or even worse, special software to play the video.





what is the best format?

What is the best video codec to use for videos?
Then it is MPEG-2